One night in December 2019, Emma Roussin realized in a mild panic that she needed a present for her child's birthday party the next day. She grabbed some acrylic paint and her daughter's old clothes and began creating a waterscape with pink koi carp swimming beneath white and green water lilies.
Although the birthday boy was not very impressed with this artistic present, it planted a seed in Mr. Roussin's heart.
A few months later, she ventured out with a collection of about a dozen hand-painted adult sweatshirts and found a more appreciative audience. It was the beginning of the coronavirus lockdown, and Ruthann, a Philadelphia artist who graduated from Temple University's Tyler School of Art and Architecture, was working from home with her husband and 1-year-old daughter as a freelance textile designer.
The sweatshirts, which she painted in the kitchen of a brick mansion in Germantown, quickly sold out online.
“I feel like it just happened to happen at the right time,'' said Rosan, 35. Although the pandemic has been divisive and frightening, it has also brought out the kinder side of people. Suddenly, comfort was king. Everyone was making sweets and doing crafts. Small-batch ceramics and upcycled quilted coats have skyrocketed in popularity. I was forced to return home and wholeheartedly embraced home-cooked food.
Recognizing that people were drawn to “things that could recreate the look of tie-dye,” Roussin learned a variety of dyeing techniques, including vegetable dyeing, ice dyeing, and brush dyeing. She swapped hard acrylic paint for fabric paint and used it to create more sweatshirts and loungewear under her brand Swan Gossip Shop.
As the pandemic brought life to a standstill, many other artists and independent designers found success in the niche world of hand-painted clothing. Part of this trend was fueled by Emily Adams Bode Aujla, who repopularized the age-old tradition of senior chords. to the 1900s with her namesake brand.
These makers are located all over the country and use a variety of techniques, mediums, and styles. In Los Angeles, Juliette Johnston paints oversized sherbet-colored flowers, butterflies, and peace signs on T-shirts and fitted work pants. In St. Louis, Lauren Dela Roche and Curtis Campanelli of 69 Tearz use 19th-century farmhouse feed sacks as canvases for gothic hand lettering and rubber hose-like cartoon characters. In New York, Nick Williams and Phil Ayers of Small Talk Studio juxtapose images such as American brand logos and botanical drawings on Japanese cotton.
In the age of mass-produced fast fashion, these designers and others say they are experiencing an increased demand for meticulously crafted, one-of-a-kind garments.
Currently, Roussin's hand-painted custom clothing, ranging in price from $250 (T-shirts and sweatshirts) to $800 (select pants), has been on a waiting list for several months. She partners with local boutiques. Streetwear brand Teddy Fresh. Additionally, national retailers such as Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters, and Free People sell shirts, socks, bags, and dresses in small quantities.
“People say they feel a certain energy in hand-painted things,” Roussin said this summer afternoon as she carefully added greenery to the vines of her blue jeans.
Although her brand has now spread across the country, Roussin still paints her clothes at home, mostly at her kitchen table. Her process usually takes several days and consists of three steps: outlining the form, painting, and heat-setting everything with an iron.
“I feel like with the rise of AI, people are leaning pretty hard in the opposite direction,” she says. “I think people gravitate toward art when everything feels impersonal.”
Roussin's works are fantastical, depicting unusual Garden of Eden-like scenes, including angels, rabbits, butterflies, devils, swans, the moon, and rivers. She creates a storybook world where the sun smiles and clowns run around.
She draws inspiration from vintage children's book illustrators such as Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl. Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt (known for her works that depict pious domestic life). And ancient art.
His daily walks to Auberry Arboretum, half a mile from his home, also provide him with creative inspiration. There is “nothing in the way” between what blooms there and what she paints, she said.
Before her first daughter, Rosie, was born in 2018, Roussin was designing prints for mass-market brands. At the time, she also painted by hand, but later her designs were scanned, Photoshopped, printed on fabric, and sold to companies like Gap, Old Navy, and Alfred Danner. I did.
Roussin said his job today is “kind of the opposite of trying to design for thousands of people who want the same thing.”
Roussin sometimes orders plain white shirts or finds brightly colored clothing at thrift stores, but more often customers provide her with their own clothing to paint (the The range ranges from $800 Acne jeans to your favorite old T-shirts). Roussin said this is a way to give clothes a second life and make cherished pieces even more special.
The popularity of hand-drawn designs like hers can pose challenges. For artists, making a single garment can be time-consuming and physically taxing.
Dela Roche of 69 Tearz once joked that she was a “doodle machine.” But now, due to arthritis and bone spurs in her hands, “I literally can't draw anything by hand anymore,” she said.
Last year, she and her business partner Mr. Campanelli began screen-printing the outlines of their designs onto clothing. Only about 25 are screen printed before Dela Roche, 42, switches out the images. Campanelli, 33, still hand-stitches each garment and hand-paints certain areas, ensuring each piece is unique.
“Even if you do your best, you can never do the same thing twice,” he said.
In 2023, Small Talk Studio designers Williams and Ayers expanded their then three-year-old business with a seasonal ready-to-wear collection.
“We had all these ideas that we wanted to bring to life, and we wanted this movement to support more than just these specific hand-painted garments,” said Williams, 33. How much can you charge, and how much can you get out just by doing that? ”
Regarding the current interest in such pieces, Ayers, 34, added: “I don't know if this is a trend, but I do know that people are interested in hand-painted clothes.”
Roussin also had to make some adjustments. When working with brands like Anthropologie and Free People, she is often tasked with fulfilling large orders for the same garments. For example, 60 pairs of naturally dyed socks or 40 T-shirts with embroidered kittens.
“They know it's not all the same, but they're trying to make it as similar as possible,” she says. “I just work in batches. It's kind of like an assembly line style.”
Lately, Roussin has re-embraced the idea of licensing artwork to be scanned and printed on clothing. “I would like to shift more into that in the future,” she said. “Honestly, hand-drawing everything is a physical process, so it’s really hard.”
She is trying to find balance.
“Everything I paint always has at least one moment of growth,” she says, pointing to a small area of the T-shirt where the red paint of the tomato bleeds into the blue of the stream. . “I always try to have a few moments where I just say to myself, even if no one notices or appreciates it, I just think it's really cool.”
