NYLON - March 2008 - (Page 156) TOP DRAWER Alyson Fox’s studio might be the most beautiful, the most orderly I’ve ever seen: meticulously arranged drawings (her own) and books (including one about her favorite designer, Hella Jongerius), a tidy desk, a clothing stand with her own designs hanging neatly from it. “I’m pretty much the opposite of what people think of as an artist,” says the Austin-based photographer, sculptor, and fashion designer. “I’m completely obsessive —I write a to-do list every night. I’m unbelievably task oriented.” Given the range of her interests and efforts, she has to be: “Fridays are devoted to drawing, and not even thinking about the clothes—Mondays are usually about the drawing, too,” says Fox. “Tuesdays through Thursdays are about the clothes—researching, photographing, working with the textiles, trying to get my drawings on the clothing.” We are here, in the precisely decorated Austin, Texas home she shares with her fiancé, to talk, mainly, about the drawings: spare, minimalist work, chiefly of women, occasionally involved in acts of quiet but serious menace. In one, two girls in capes march in step, rifles slung over their shoulders; in another, a woman seems on the verge of vacuuming up her daughter. The undertones of barely subdued violence are fully intentional: Texan artist Alyson Fox has an eye for fashion—both on and off the page. By Diane Vadino “I’d hate if my art was classified as these sweet little drawings—I want this feeling that’s very familiar, but there’s something alarming going on as well,” she says. “Where if you sit with it long enough you’re, like, ‘Oh—that’s what’s going on.’” Fox was, improbably, a nutrition and fitness major as well as a competitive runner before she had a tearful change of heart: “I just had this nervous breakdown one day where I started crying and was, like, ‘I’m not happy,’” Fox says. “My mom said I drew all the time when I was little—and I remembered, I’d take her makeup pencils and go into my closet and draw, and she’d always be finding little drawings around. I took an intro to art class, and that was it.” She was two years out of grad school and a retired Anthropologie visual display artist when her work was featured on Design Sponge, a popular design blog: “It launched me,” she says. “I just started getting e-mails from all these people, like The New York Times.” Fox is now focusing a portion of her attention on her fashion line, A Small Collection, which will appear in about a dozen stores—including her local Whole Foods, the chain’s flagship—this spring. The clothes all images courtesy of alyson fox.
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