This week on Sunday Visit, we catch up with Celeste Malvar-Stewart, a Filipino American fashion and fiber artist who focuses on sustainable design, emphasizing the importance of slow fashion within one of the most harmful industries.
Celeste works with Ohio family farms to obtain luxury wool and alpaca fiber to create her hand-felted textiles and ethereal couture fashion, using all natural materials; emphasizing the unique and beautiful textures through natural dyes that she grows, forages, and obtains from Botanical Colors! She has exhibited her work in various museums and galleries, and is widely published both nationally and internationally.
Celeste is currently a full-time independent artist and adjunct faculty at the Columbus College of Art and Design in the fashion department, as well as mentors several students and alumni. She is a Columbus Makes Art artist and serves on the board of the Greater Columbus Arts Council.
Celeste is an artist deeply rooted in her community and not only designs but teaches others about how to design regionally. Here’s what she had to say…
How long have you been designing and when was it that sustainability became important to you?
Oh my, I’ve been designing for over 35 years! As a Filipina and an immigrant, I have always been innately sustainable; even before it was “a thing,” because reusing and upcycling is common practice in our culture, but I suppose I became aware of it after obtaining my undergrad degree in Fashion Design and starting my own brand in San Francisco. As I designed and produced my own one-off pieces, I was able to witness the amount of waste (albeit natural fabrics) my small production generated. This made me worry about how much waste and toxicity the fashion industry created as a whole, and I began developing ways in which I could create more mindfully, using ethically sourced materials, and producing with minimal to zero waste, which is my ongoing goal!
You work with a lot of family fiber farms in Ohio for your materials, how did you develop a relationship with them?
I’ve been able to develop my relationships with my different farmer friends through various serendipitous ways. My relationship with my main alpaca fibre farmer began by being a client of her daughter who is an aesthetician. Because I get so excited telling everyone I meet about how I work with local sheep and alpaca, she told her mom, Laurel – who is a shepherdess in Springfield, Ohio about me. Laurel happened to also be part of the Alpaca Owners Association who had their keynote speaker back out at the last minute, so she asked me to speak. Their conference was in California where I just so happened to be at the time and I talked about creating a bridge between designers and fiber producers; thankfully, everyone seemed to enjoy it! And from that pivotal event and our mutual love of alpacas and their fiber, Laurel and I schemed about how we can collaborate more and developed a friendship that I treasure.
Talk about how natural dyes are an important part of your designs. What makes them so exciting to use?
Natural dyes play such a big part in my designs, as I plan so much around “what colors” I envision each piece to be. Also, being natural is an important aspect because of how I try to create pieces that are organic, natural, regenerative, biodegradable, upcyclable, and not harmful if ever discarded. I find so much character in natural dyes as well; I sometimes love incorporating them in ways that don’t always strictly follow recipes – rather more exploratory – that give me color which can be unexpected. I find it thrilling, and I’m constantly learning by trial and error with natural dyes and appreciate Botanical Colors’ Feedback Fridays and Mordant Mondays where I’ve learned so much!
What’s your favorite color right now and why?
My fave color is INDIGO BLUE! I mean, my name is Celeste (sky blue in Spanish), so it’s no surprise! But I love the rich tones of blue that indigo can give and I appreciate its living contribution to my work; I enjoy talking to my vats and I find that every vat has its own “personality” in the way it behaves and yields its color. Indigo blue is where it’s at for me!
Follow Celeste on Instagram!
Photography info for images:
Celeste’s headshot: Priscilla Dwomoh
Hand-felted gown dyed in foraged black walnut: Priscilla Dwomoh
Hand-felted gown using all alpaca fiber (no wool) dyed in indigo (from Botanical Colors): Priscilla Dwomoh
Hand-felted gown dyed in cochineal (from Botanical Colors): Tariq Tarey