Kate Snelling

Excerpts from an Interview with the Designer

Recorded on: March 22 2023

Tell me about your collection!

At first I was really inspired by mythology surrounding desire and temptation, and how those two things interact with femininity. In high school I read this play called the Bacchae about Dionysus and his followers, which are called maenads. That's where I took off from there because the maenads are these mythological followers of Dionysus who go into this frenzied state of revelry and they like to dance around in the woods. They're violent, and to the Greeks maenads represented what women and femininity would be like left to their own devices: women without the influence of men. And basically they're scary creatures because they were afraid of this femininity. So that's what I wanted to encapsulate in my collection: femininity left to its own devices. It’s kind of Greek inspired, but it's also my take on this idea. It's creepy, kind of back-woodsy. I like it. 

What is your favorite piece of the collection?

I designed my own fabric for it, based on a painting of maenads that are in the woods dancing and holding their ritual. I used this painting, edited it in Photoshop, and then made it into a fabric. I really like it. It looks like a painting, but it's also my own thing. I'm using that as a skirt, that'll probably be my favorite thing that I make.

What was the process of making the fabric?

I've had this idea for a really long time, for a year now, and I've been collecting Pinterest pictures and it was one of my Pinterest images. I really liked this image specifically to encapsulate the whole collection, and I took it and I reflected it onto itself. I changed the colors a bit to match the other fabric that I had, put a couple filters on it in Photoshop and then it turned into looking like what I wanted. 

How do you relate this mythology of the maenads to the world today?

I have two male models, even though it's about femininity, and I think that it still holds. Even in today's society, femininity is seen as a weakness, and as much as women are seen as weak for being feminine, it’s even more so if you're a man expressing femininity. I wanted to showcase that it can be really powerful

and really beautiful, whether you're a man or a woman to express femininity. I'm using very luxurious fabrics. I actually thrifted a lot of my fabrics. A lot of them are from home decor, people's curtains that they donated. So a lot of it is very floral, very lacy.

What challenges have you experienced?

Because I thrifted most of my fabric, I am really constrained to what I can find. My designs are really more following what fabric I ended up, besides the one that I designed myself. I think that's really how I pulled it all together, was through that fabric that I designed myself because I took colors and elements from all of my other fabrics.

How have you been working with color in your collection?

I love color, I'm a big color person. I've been told that I have a very good eye for it, so that's something that I really focus on. I like to work with a lot of jewel tones because I like the feeling that it elicits, it’s a very bold color. I found a lot of fabric that was green and yellow, like yellow-gold. That's kind of where I started, the fabric that I found that I liked. I have this gold too, for the idea of beauty and luxury.