Cool Women Doing Cool Shit: Dottie’s Clothing

questions Kim Hickerson
answers Jennifer Denise Lynch

hair and makeup stylist - Andrea Lemonds
model - Anna Marie / Brink
clothing - Dottie Clothing
photographer - Lacey Elaine Tackett

What is your earliest clothing memory?
My earliest clothing memory is from my fourth birthday. We lived overseas at the time and only came back to “the States” once a year, so McDonald’s was the biggest deal to me and I obviously chose to have my birthday party there. My mom let me dress myself from the moment I could, and for my birthday I borrowed my dad’s Bart Simpson “Don’t Have a Cow, Man” t-shirt to wear as a dress, which I then belted and accessorized with a bolo tie and my red cowboy boots. And a side ponytail, obviously. Probably still one of my best outfits to date. The night ended with my Uncle Bob pretending to take a bite of my cheeseburger and me in tears. 

How do you get started making clothes?
Having a mom who sews helped give me a head start, for sure. And I took home economics in junior high. Do they still have home ec? I was in junior high during the nineties, so it was still a thing. But there are books out there about basic clothing construction that would probably be a good place to start for anyone interested. And the internet, I guess.

My first sewing project was a dress for my Barbie when I was four. Probably during the same trip where I had my Mickey D’s birthday party. Obviously my mom helped me/did most of the work, but I was so proud. She made quite a bit of my clothes when I was little and I was really eager to learn. My Grandma Myrtle and Aunt B split the cost of a Strawberry Shortcake sewing machine for me and my mom taught me how to sew using doll patterns. It’s pretty unbelievable that they made, and still apparently make, sewing machines for small children, but I think that the needle is pretty much fully encased and tiny fingers are hopefully protected. Anyway, so the first dress I ever made was a sleeveless v-neck mid-calf burgundy corduroy potato sack number with an disproportionately large snap at the neck.

How do you choose patterns or designs?
My main focus for Dottie, my vintage-inspired clothing line named after my Grandma Dot, is to find patterns inspired by the outfits my mom made for me when I was a tiny human. This mostly revolved around coordinates, pastels and simplicity, i.e. elastic. 

What made you expand into doing Broad Shoppe?
I decided to expand from just doing Dottie into Broad Shoppe because I kept coming across incredible women out there making all kinds of amazing things, and I kept thinking about how great it would be to work with them and go beyond the stuff that I was doing. So I just started emailing some of them, and to my surprise, they wanted to work with me too. Some of the first people to agree to work with Broad Shoppe were Sara Lyons, Little Arrow, and Penelope Gazin, and I am so thankful for all of them.

How did you get to be such a badass?
First of all, thank you for calling me that. That’s not a badass response, but it is appreciative. I think that what coolness I do have all stems from my middle school witch phase. As an adult I realize that apparently everyone had a witch phase, but mine was at an extreme level. I was broken up with for the first time as a seventh-grader in 1996, the year that The Craft came out. Enough said. This period in time mostly isolated me from the majority of the seventh grade and made people afraid of me, although I was really just a girl with braces and acne and a grown out perm, usually wearing my PSYCHO shirt by beloved artist Poe. I also hexed everyone and got called to the principal’s office multiple times. But yeah, that pretty much alienated me for the rest of my public school career, and it thankfully made me stop giving a shit about what people think. Now, pretty much every time I meet someone who also went through a witch phase, we’re immediate friends. How ironic.

What do you wish the world understand about women?
The first thing that pops into my head is, “That we’re equal,” and then that thought immediately makes me feel so deeply sad and infuriated about the fact that it’s 2017 and we’re still living in a society where we have to remind ourselves of that. I think about right after the presidential election, during Hillary Clinton’s concession speech when she said, “and to all the little girls who are watching this, never doubt that you are valuable and powerful and deserving of every chance and opportunity in the world to pursue and achieve your own dreams.” But that seems to be the point that we’re at. I could go on for ages, but mentioning everything that has happened since the election is a separate beast that I can’t even get into. 

What are your hopes for the future on a macro and micro level?
At a macro level, I hope that we all can all make it through the next four years. Seriously. We are in such an incredibly volatile situation right now, who knows what will happen. I am incredibly inspired by the amount of resistance that I have witnessed coming from so many people over the past few months; activism sprouting up in ways from strictly political and pragmatic to the extremely personal in both physical art and music. Keep fighting the good fight everyone. On a micro level, I just hope to continue building Broad Shoppe and that it can serve as some sort of outlet and community space, and that it will eventually become a physical location sometime in the future.