photo by Brian and Stella Alesi
Jennifer Perkins and Tina Sparkles
Issue #34
The Austin DIY queens make the most of thrift-store scores
By Marisa Meltzer
Published: December 1st, 2007 | 2:45pm
“I have fashion ADD!” says Jennifer Perkins of Naughty Secretary Club. She’s talking about how she likes to change her look with her whims. “In the past week I have gone out twice: One night I wore my hair in braids with these brown leather biker-babe hair wraps that have long suede fringe wrapped around the pigtails, which I paired with my new ankle-high fringed brown moccasins,” she explains. “But for the rest of the week, I refrained from washing my hair so that I could tease it into a big beehive, which I wore with a T-shirt, jeans, and platforms.”
Today Perkins, who has a how-to jewelry-making book due out in summer 2008 called Naughty Secretary Club: Jewelry for the Working Girl, settled on a pair of ankle boots — just one pair from her 200-plus shoe collection. She pairs them with a black and white dress she found in Dallas’ import district and coral earrings she made from revamped ’80s plastic hoops with some-green flower petals and horse charms added on. “I wear my own jewelry most of the time mainly because no one makes jewelry tackaliscious enough for my taste,” she laughs.
Her friend and fellow crafter, Tina Sparkles of Sparklecraft, is wearing an early ’40s-inspired high-waist skirt and blouse with little chopped socks that she made herself. Sparkles, who is working on a sewing and patternmaking book herself, makes everything she wears. “I stopped buying new clothes about three years ago as a sort of social experiment on myself,” she says. “I wanted to stop contributing to mass clothing production as well as force myself to learn how to do patternmaking.” In addition to making outfits from scratch, she reconstructs a lot of clothes she gets from thrift stores and clothing swaps, so that one piece of clothing will have several different lives.
They are both proud residents of Austin, Texas, a city that Sparkles says has “too many awesome vintage stores to name.” Perkins finds constant inspiration from Austin. “Spend a Thursday night at the Beauty Bar, a Saturday shopping on South Congress, or a stroll through UT campus on any weekday, and you can’t help but be inspired.”
She travels quite a bit for work and when she’s in other cities, she shops so she can see both what the locals are wearing and score some handmade goodies. “Some cities are much more subdued with their fashion than others,” she explains. “Interestingly, I find the bigger the city, the less daring the natives are in the fashion department
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