A Profile on Ella Mae Jepsen
Published in Wack Mag Issue 01, which can be found digitally here.
“It’s illegal to be a nudist,” Ella Jepsen, apparel design major at Rhode Island School of Design, reminded me.
She’s right; you do indeed need to be clothed, at least in public. But getting “dressed” can mean a lot of different things. For Game of Thrones star, and personal icon of mine, Maisie Williams, it means a pleated skirt, leather jacket, flared wrist cuffs, and a sheek black mask; but, for my earth science professor, it means a short sleeve button up and khaki shorts. Clothing is essential, yet it is art, and art welcomes interpretation.
I hopped on a Zoom call with my cousin Ella in May of 2020. She’s someone who I didn’t see much growing up, but when we found ourselves both at college in the Northeast, we started seeing each other more. Ella wore a chunky, brown sweater and had a “Crisp Apple” Angry Orchard cider in her hand. I was wearing a thick, brown sweater and had, you guessed it, a “Crisp Apple” Angry Orchard cider in my hand. We laughed about how similar we looked, but also how we were not surprised because in the few years we had gotten to know each other better, we realized we were incredibly alike.
Ella grew up in Crestone, Colorado—population of 146. Crestone has character; it has gorgeous scenery, strong spirituality, and is home to a very talented artist. My mom loves to tell me about the first time she ever visited Crestone: “We were driving down a dirt road and a real-life tumbleweed blew across the road, followed by a three legged dog.”
Ella remembers always wanting to be a fashion designer. She told me that when she was just six years old, “My mom had this big hamper full of scrap fabric that she would use for making quilts and I just dove in it. I took a pair of big silver scissors and just started cutting out this poncho-thing and I was like ‘Mom! Look how great this looks!’ and she just said ‘wow.’”
Ella once made a dress out of a trash bag and wore it to school. This made me laugh because it makes perfect sense. I can so easily see her big, glossy eyes and wild, wavy hair paired perfectly with a very fashionable dress, only slightly resembling a trash bag she stole from under her mom’s kitchen sink.
Fashion is something that is a part of people’s everyday lives. But when you start to look at it as a profession, you begin to question it more deeply. Ella told me that growing up it was more of a creative outlet that she simply had fun doing, which still resonated with her, but what’s changed is how she questions it. She says there’s “this whole other element that has come to surface, which is ‘what do you want your clothing to say, what do you want your clothing to do.’”
Questions are what keep her moving as an artist, which is something we can all channel in our own work. “I think art is meant to be questioned and I think that fashion is an art form and we should question why we’re doing it, why we’re making it, why we’re wearing it, what it’s saying, and how a certain cut of something says something more than a different cut or neckline or silhouette.”
Questions are how something grows. They are how we grow. If we are always so sure of ourselves we will never make changes or challenge ourselves. When we start to question what we are doing with our lives, whether we are actually happy, or actually a good person, we become in tune with what we genuinely want, who we genuinely are. The same goes for art —there are just fewer consequences. But, asking ourselves what we want our art to accomplish is how it grows. This idea brings Ella to sustainability.
Growing up she spent a lot of time in the mountains and has “had a lot of fun going out and foraging.” These experiences growing up have informed her artistic process. She is inclined to do it all from scratch, “like picking the wild berries and the wild roses and flowers and experimenting with what shows up on certain fabrics and what doesn’t.”
Ella got really excited talking about natural dyes: “Okay, natural dyes are super cool,” she told me. And I trust her. “I love the idea that you can just milk the colors from the earth and you can just take things that are around you and use them. And, in doing so, you’re not affecting or polluting the planet at all, which is so great.”
I asked her about some of her favorite materials for dye, and she explained that you mainly need your primary colors. So, for red she has been using madder root powder. She had to buy that one online because, unfortunately, she said “I can’t like forage tree roots from that tree.” Turmeric for a bold yellow. Indigo for blue, or red cabbage, or black beans, but indigio is ideal
This also helps her be more sustainable in her own home. She said, “I’ve been finding all the things I can reuse again as dyes, like black beans. If you have beans that are leftover you can use them to make a blue dye or coffee grounds—I save all my coffee grounds, I save all my onion skin. And it’s this wonderful thing, like you can do it even before you compost them to give them a second life again.”
She plays with these vibrant colors on repurposed fabrics: old shower curtains, clothing scraps, and bedsheets. The patterns she achieves from rust, petals, roots, and produce is unreal. You almost can’t believe they are derived from such natural sources, but at the same time it is the only explanation for such grounding colors.
The fashion world is not perfect, which can be discouraging. Ella doesn’t always love the world surrounding her art, but that is why it’s all the more important to have small, slow, purposeful, fashion designers like Ella Jepsen.
“I love that idea of making something that is so nice, special, and one of a kind that you can’t buy it in fast fashion and it really becomes a part of your closet, a part of your identity, something you want to wear and love. I love that idea of just having treasures that you can continue to wear over time.”
As our conversation transitioned from art to how we were hanging in there, I thought about how I can’t wait for the day that I can have an Ella Mae design in my own closet, but I must be patient. The day will come when I can buy a piece from her and hang onto it forever, knowing that it was either repurposed from existing materials or came straight from the earth.