Friday, December 13, 2013

28th Anniversary of Carol Booton's Weddings Without Rules, an Art-Fashion Performance

Remember 1985? While the rest of us were prancing around in our Flashdance hair, spandex tights, and legwarmers, a small group of Los Angeles artists and clothing designers were combining art, performance, and fashion into a hip new form of self-expression. 


By Artemis Taft
December 8, 2013

One such artist/designer with a vision was Carol Booton, who was then the owner of a custom clothing design studio in Hollywood.

Twenty-eight years after the show, I tracked Booton to her digs in Portland, Oregon, where she is a self-employed marketing research consultant. She laughed when I told her I wanted to talk about the Weddings Without Rules event at the Park Plaza Hotel. “That was a million years ago!” she said, but she agreed to email me photos and scanned images of the event materials. My inbox filled up with batches of jpegs. A dancing wedding cake! A jewel-encrusted mermaid! Eventually we connected again by phone, and I got the scoop on Weddings Without Rules, straight from the visionary creator herself.

Susan Nininger wrapped up the sold-out 1985 Weddings Without Rules art-fashion performance with
a jewel-encrusted mermaid by Connie Parente and an entourage of fish-headed ushers.
(Location: Park Plaza Hotel, Los Angeles. Models and photographer unknown)

In 1984 Booton had produced Fashion Without Rules, an art-fashion performance at Hollywood venue Club Lingerie. Flush with the success of that event, Booton devised a grander vision, focusing on the theme of weddings. “I was working through some relationships issues,” she laughed. “Seemed like a good idea at the time.” She used the same format as her first production, calling upon her designer friends and acquaintances to contribute wedding-related vignettes. 

The participating designers were Barbara Benish, Nadia Evasu, Georgia Gilliam, Mel Grayson, Harrington Keisch, Carolyn Krause, Kate Lindsay, Susan Nininger, Connie Parente, Patti Ratcliffe, Jennifer Q. Smith, and Warren Thomas. Each designer had artistic control over his or her own presentation, including choosing models, music, and choreography. Most of the garments were designed specifically for this event.

Artist and producer Carol Booton designed a wedding ensemble
entitled "Look but Don't Touch,"
for her Weddings Without Rules Art-Fashion Performance,
held September 29, 1985, at the Park Plaza Hotel.
(Model: C. Felix, photographer unknown)
In the program notes, Booton wrote, “The theme of weddings is intriguing for a variety of reasons. People tend to take weddings very seriously. There are rules governing every facet of the event, rules that are begging to be stretched and broken. Everyone agrees that the weddings we like most are the ones where the performers take chances, whether that means taking vows during a sky dive or wearing the ‘wrong’ color.”

Booton added, “Weddings offer an exciting combination of art, theater, fashion, style, performance, and costume. This show was intended to be a showcase for clothing designs that transcended the dull perimeters of traditional wedding clothing, in hopes that people’s ideas of what is ‘proper’ wedding wear would be stretched and broken, too.”

Weddings Without Rules, an art-fashion performance produced by artist-designer Carol Booton, entertained audiences at the Park Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, California, on September, 29, 1985. Thirteen California designers and artists presented art costumes and fashions related to weddings and marriage. Booton said, “These artists and designers were all interested in creating something beyond the tradition we used to call wearable art.” Some of the work was anything but wearable, according to Booton, who noted that in some cases the models were barely able to walk. Yet the designs had one thing in common: They required a human body in motion to be showcased properly. “There is a fine line between fashion and art,” she added. The Weddings Without Rules art-fashion performance was intended to expand our notions of which is which.

Carolyn Krause showed a wedding gown made of woven
and stitched celluloid film for
the 1985 Weddings Without Rules art-fashion performance.
(Models and photographers unknown)
The performance attracted approximately 400 spectators, most of whom paid $7.00 for advance tickets. The doors opened at 8:00 p.m. so guests could mingle and linger at the bar before the show began at 9:00 p.m. Each guest received a 20-page magazine-style program containing full-page ads placed by sponsors of the event. Sponsors included Barbara Benish (who was selling hand-painted t-shirts in Venice, CA at the time); Freehand, a gallery of hand-made jewelry, clothing, and crafts on West Third Street in Los Angeles; Deborah F. Lawrence, an eclectic artist selling hand-made calendars; Art Resource Technology, Joanne Warfield’s art consulting firm; Kate Lindsay’s line of custom clothing designs; Dianne O., hair and makeup artist; Elisha Shapiro, offering his long-running Nihilism Calendar; Linda Albertano, advertising a performance at the now-defunct Lhasa Club with Henry Rollins; Cake and Art, a bakery still creating edible art in West Hollywood, California; and Cointreau, who catered the event with liquor-flavored chicken wings and other goodies. Other advertisers included Elizabeth Wamsley, Steps into Space, Stella & Bessie Beading, and Park’s Tuxedos and Bridal.

A press preview was held on Thursday, September 12, 1985, in the lobby of the Park Plaza Hotel. Pre-show publicity included an article by Rubin Carson in the September 1985 issue of Los Angeles Magazine and an article by Liz Blackman in the Style section of the L.A. Weekly, issue September 27-October 3, 1985. Before the event, KNBC News ran a short segment focusing on the notion of wedding apparel that breaks with tradition. Members of the press were invited to meet the designers before the event. After-show publicity included a video segment on Channel 18 for Japanese audiences. An article by Mary Rourke ran in the L.A. Times on December 6, 1985.

Carol Booton's tongue-in-cheek
commentary on the wedding
rituals, designed for her Weddings
Without Rules art-fashion performance,
held September 29, 1985, at the
Park Plaza Hotel
Carol Booton spent 20 years in Los Angeles, where she dabbled in custom sewing. Besides making way too many wedding gowns, bridesmaids’ frocks, Easter, prom, and cruise dresses, and costumes for commercials and television, she also designed barely-wearable apparel—her “art-fashion.” She flogged her sewing business for a good ten years before deciding she hated to sew too much to continue and escaped to the corporate world of marketing research, where she remains as of this writing.

The Park Plaza Hotel, an historic landmark across from the famous MacArthur Park was designed and built by architect Claud Beelman in 1923-24 for the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks. After the Elks were done with it, the building was converted into a swanky hotel. No longer a hotel, it is often used as a set for movies and television. But you can still rent its ornate Art Deco ballrooms for a wedding.

—Artemis Taft
The Seamier Side of Sewing blog
Theseamierside.blogspot.com



From the producer’s post-show photo album:
Mel Grayson, designer.
(Model and photographer unknown)
  • Barbara Benish showed three brides displaying Latin origins and religious influences.
  • Carol Booton showed three couples wearing ensembles based on wedding night rituals, choreographed to Aretha Franklin’s Respect.
  • Nadia Evasu presented a bride in white lace and tulle.
  • Georgia Gilliam created a bridal gown of handmade paper, lace, net, and Christmas tree lights, and presented it on a mannequin in the auditorium foyer.
  • Mel Grayson invited a modern dance troupe to perform before he presented a collection of high fashion brides in black.
  • Carolyn Krause presented her “Hollywood Bride,” wearing a dress made of interwoven strips of celluloid film.
  • Harrington Keisch showed Death, wearing a long black robe, interacting with a bride in a beaded black gown.
  • Kate Lindsay showed a high-fashion ensemble of white leather, presented to a Judy Garland lip-synch.
  • Susan Nininger presented the grand finale with an underwater wedding fantasy, complete with an entourage of fishhead ushers carrying a mermaid bride ensconced in a bed of jewels, designed by Connie Parente.
  • Patti Ratcliffe modeled a dress shaped like a three-tiered wedding cake, flinging cake in all directions with Barbie and Ken dolls perched atop her wedding cake hat.
  • Jennifer Q. Smith delighted the audience with a playful hand-painted satin gown, presented to the tune of “Going to the Chapel.”
  • Warren Thomas showed a high fashion bride in chiffon and tulle.
Barbara Benish designed a wedding group for the Wedding Without Rules art-fashion performance,
held at the Park Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles on September 29, 1985
(Model and photographer unknown)








Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Are you sure you want to do this?

This is always the first question I ask when I'm starting a new venture. This is the question I should have asked myself when I started my custom sewing business back in 1981. It wasn't so much that I made a decision to open a custom sewing shop. More like, I had one foot in the hole, and I gradually lost my hold on reality and fell in all the way. I grew up sewing. It was a craft I could do pretty well, and I learned how to do it better and better with each project. But there were some pitfalls that only became apparent in hindsight. That means, if I'd known then what I know now, I might have made a different choice!

Welcome to the Seamier Side of Sewing for Survival! Here is where I will share with you what I learned when I was self-employed as a custom clothing designer. Or you could call me a seamstress, I don't care. And I will share what I've learned about business, marketing, and customer service. Now I teach business, marketing, and computer classes at a career college. I will use examples from my own venture to help you with yours. In other words, don't do what I did! I made every mistake it is possible to make, I think.

Here are some mistakes I made. You can find solutions to (some of) these problems on the Before you begin page.
  1. I had no business plan.
  2. I had no advice from professionals.
  3. For an embarrassingly long time, I didn't have a business bank account.
  4. I had no bookkeeper, no accountant, no personal banker, just a bunch of maxed out credit cards. (This was back in the day when I was thrilled to have a 16% interest rate on my Visa card.)
  5. I had no recordkeeping systems (those were pre-computer days, too).
  6. Believe it or not, when I started sewing for money, all I had was a used Singer 503A machine I had received for high school graduation. (I won't tell you how long ago that was, but I will say if that thing hadn't been stolen, it would still be running, that's how great of a machine it was.)
  7. I worked out of my boyfriend's garlic-filled kitchen until I could find a studio space I could afford. The first place I found couldn't be found by any of my customers, it was so inaccessible. The second place was next door to a massage parlor (more on that later).
  8. And worst of all, I hated to sew.
More on that later, too. For now I'll just say that my ten-plus years of sewing for a living gave me a rich, somewhat fetid body of experience to share with you. Now I know what not to do. I can save you money, time, and tears. And probably blood and sweat, too, but that will cost a little extra. Kidding.

So, stay tuned as I attempt to fill in these pages with information you can start using right away. I'd say “Happy sewing!” but I wouldn't really mean it. Instead I'll just say, “Here there be dragons! Abandon hope all ye who enter here, the Seamier Side of Sewing for Survival!”