SAN FRANCISCO — When Colleen Quen revisits her style creations, it is greater than only a reunion. It’s a reconnection with the guts and soul.
“It is part of me, I’ll cry,” Quen says. “These items are an extension. Each inch of my vitality is put into them via my coronary heart.”
Her pleasure stems from years of creating one-of-a-kind attire within the model of French high fashion.
“I’ve round 180 items in storage and each is totally different. They’re timeless,” Quen stated. “When you deal with them, they develop into sustainable heirlooms.”
From 1998 to 2013, Quen was certainly one of San Francisco’s celebrated style designers who dressed town’s elites, excessive society and celebrities.
Quen’s hottest piece is the “Madam Butterfly” gown. She guesses that she has made 4 hundred customized variations for her purchasers through the years.
“That gown most likely supported my enterprise,” Quen stated.
Her signature piece is what she calls the “empress coat,” a flowing gold A-line coat that is meant to seem like royalty. A photograph of her sporting the coat from cowl photograph hangs on her wall.
“She’s my delight and pleasure and I thought of it 24-karat gold and he or she’s a strolling piece of knickknack,” Quen stated. “I by no means put on my items, however after I put them on for the shoot, I felt like I used to be in heaven.”
Quen studied style with the late Simone Sethna on the San Francisco French Haute Couture Faculty, the place she realized the artwork of what she affectionately calls “sacred geometry.”
“Sacred geometry has this method, this composition, but it surely’s nonetheless so lovely due to the best way the numbers are calculated,” Quen defined. “Artwork and math work collectively. It is about designing for the human physique the place you can also make a strolling piece of artwork.”
Immediately, as an alternative of shaping the fabric, he’s now shaping the following era of style designers, passing on his couture data to a small group of scholars inside his small studio.
“I need to share this as a result of I am honored that I used to be even granted to be taught this myself,” Quen stated. “My instructor instructed me to not change any of this, to honor French high fashion and train if he needed, however to not change something I taught him.”
Quen courses start with meticulous calculations and formulation that really feel extra like engineering than artwork. One in every of her college students, Lea Luellen, discovered the exhausting means.
“I used to be by no means good at math till I met Colleen,” Luellen stated. “She has taught me to make use of totally different elements of my mind to create.”
“I really feel like that is my objective in life, to be taught what I can and grasp my work, however to share as a result of when you develop into a grasp, it’s a must to give again to the planet and to the individuals who need to be impressed by this,” Quen stated. .
