Clare Vivier wants to know if there will be snow for Christmas. Not in Los Angeles, where she lives now with her husband and son, but back in St. Paul, where she grew up and will soon return for family, friends, and Northern Grade @ MIA Presents: From Maker to Market, a December 26 discussion at the Minneapolis Institute of Art with fellow Twin Cities native Maxine Bédat of Zady.com (her fashion retail partnership with Soraya Darabi) on made-in-America style. “I can’t spend Christmas here,” she says of L.A., “it just doesn’t feel right.”
Accessories designer Clare Vivier, a St. Paul native, will discuss the made-in-America movement at the December 26 “From Maker to Market” event at the MIA.
Not that L.A. hasn’t been good to her: five years after selling her first handbags, the journalist-turned-designer recently opened her fifth factory there, turning out dozens of different handbags, clutches, and laptop sleeves, and now a line of scarves—an initial foray beyond bags that may soon include shoes. From her L.A. studio, once assured she was headed to a white Christmas, she talked with us about what it means to make things in America today.
Your bags are currently hanging in a gallery here at the MIA, as part of the all-American-made Northern Grade @ MIA shop [in the first-floor Cargill Gallery through December 29], like sculpture. You’re about 500 feet from Rembrandt. That’s a little overwhelming. It’s a huge honor to be part of Northern Grade. American-made collections tend to be more masculine-looking—we think of heritage lines as masculine, sportsmen gear—and women’s collections kind of get left out of the made-in-America movement. I used to love Gokey, a St. Paul maker of sportsmen lines, these incredible canvas and leather pieces produced at the factory that now makes J.W. Hulme. I love that aesthetic so much. We just happen to do a more feminine take on things.
Why did you decide to keep production in America? When I started, it was out of necessity. I didn’t have any production or fashion background, and the idea of producing overseas was daunting—how am I going to produce in Asia? But I started producing myself—I was a sewer—and I had an inkling that L.A. was a big manufacturing town. I knew there had to be some factories still in existence, so I started asking the people who made my hardware, the zippers and such, if they knew of any. We started with a family-owned factory in Burbank, and now we have four others.
Clare Vivier’s canvas duffel bags—for the locker room or weekends away—at the Northern Grade @ MIA store.
Isn’t it easier to go overseas? Most people think so. But I’m happy that wasn’t available to me. I wouldn’t be as close to the production as I am know. We see each and every bag come through our studio because we ship from the studio.
You grew up in St. Paul, in Crocus Hill. Is there a Minnesota style or are we just focused on staying warm? I think of the strong heritage brands from Minnesota: Red Wing and Gokey and J.W. Hulme and Minnetonka Moccasins. And shops like Black/Blue in St. Paul are really capturing that identity. I was definitely influenced by the outdoors culture, staying true to the classic lines, not too much adornment. There isn’t a lot of fussiness and hardware in my collection: it’s simple but interesting and chic. Honest. That must come from somewhere.
You were a laptop-toting journalist looking for a more stylish laptop case, and so you made one, and then another. But it was really your blog that launched the business. Very early on, I realized I had to create a story, I had to create a desire. There are bags at Target, and much cheaper than anything I could make—why should someone buy mine? This was in the early days of blogs, and I remember reading the blog of an American girl who lived in Paris; I didn’t know her, but I loved her story. I realized that we’re interested in people’s stories, we follow people’s lives, and that creates desires. So I thought perhaps people would be interested in my life: I’m interesting, I live in Los Angeles where it’s always sunny and beautiful, my husband’s French, I travel to France a lot. So I started chronicling the beginning of my designing life, my family life, my friends.
And it worked. It absolutely worked. I chronicled my journey, the struggles of a businessperson, and of course it became part of a larger story: there were a lot of women getting started in the creative community in Los Angeles and they were all doing interesting things. To this day, people tell me, “I followed you from the beginning.” I still blog sometimes, and we’ll see upticks in sales of the bags I write about. But excitingly the brand is bigger than me now.
Some businesspeople would be reluctant to share their failures, but people seemed drawn to your honesty. Well, I didn’t tell the gruesome details. I didn’t want to be depressing.
What new blog-worthy ventures are you excited about? I always wanted to be in French stores, because my husband’s French and I speak French and we’re in France fairly often, and now we’re in one of the most famous French department stores, Bonmarché. Also, we’re collaborating with Apple on laptop envelopes, which is exciting because that’s how I started. We’ll have them in Apple stores by Christmas. It’s good to have something made in America in there. Their products say, “Designed in California.” Ours say, “Made in California.”