When you consider the range of projects designer Alyson Fox has carried off, you might wonder if there’s anything she can’t do: prints, illustration, jewelry, clothing, textiles, not to mention a book of portraits. While Fox has degrees in photography and sculpture, she says she never really had a preconceived idea “of what I wanted to do or what it would look like.”
After getting her MFA at the University of Colorado, Fox went to work on visuals for Anthropologie before deciding to focus on her own practice, in particular her drawings. Her “fictional family album” — faceless figures at once familiar and unsettling — eventually caught the attention of Design Sponge. More accolades followed, along with commissions, and Fox has since collaborated on various editions with West Elm, H&M, Of A Kind, Ink Dish, and Hawkins New York (whose rugs with Fox we featured a few weeks back). She’s also been selling (and selling out of) limited runs of her statement-making yet easily wearable necklaces, under the label A Small Collection. This May, she’s aiming to expand that with a line of clothing, jewelry, and housewares made in partnership with artisans around the world.
Fox might modestly credit her success to “being on the right blog at the right time,” but her eye for line, color, and pattern has a whole lot to do with it — as does her curiosity and desire to experiment with different media and materials. “I think of it all as the same project, as one big piece it’s hard for me to break apart. Even though it may be a rug, it started as a drawing, and even though it’s a clothing line, I’m thinking about the way I want to photograph it even while I’m sketching. No matter what it is, I attack it in the same way.” Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that Fox designed and built her own home. With the help of family in the trade, she and her husband spent a year constructing it from scratch and in late 2012, they moved a half hour’s drive west of Austin to Spicewood, Texas. Not only does Fox now have spectacular hill country views, but after years of working at a little desk, she has her own studio where she can dream up what’s next.
After looking for land for about a year, getting discouraged, and thinking they’d stay in their small place in central Austin, Fox and her husband were driving through Spicewood, Texas, when they saw a For Sale sign that said “View.” “We just started laughing, like yeah right. But we trudged our way up and we were like, ‘This is perfect!’” In the middle of the five-acre lot was a 20-foot ridge, where they built their simple yet stunning house: white stucco exterior, concrete floors, wall-length windows, and wood finishes. These doors open into one of the guest bedrooms.
Fox wearing a hand-woven pima cotton sweater from her upcoming line, which is set to include six garments, a selection of jewelry, two wooden chairs with woven textiles, a tapestry rug, and metal coasters. Fox is going for versatile, lasting pieces she can keep reworking — producing the same clothes in different textiles, or swapping in new fabrics on the chairs. In collaboration with artisans in India, Mexico, Rwanda, Bolivia, and Chile, she comes up with ideas and is then “presented with the local materials the artisans have, the way they’re able to dye, their traditional methods of weaving or block printing. I work with their skills sets.” The collection will be available on Fox’s website.
Plants, says Fox, are “the best form of decoration in a house. In college, I fell in love with Alice Neel paintings, one in particular called ‘Nancy and the Rubber Plant,’ and I loved the rubber plant in that painting but all the ones I always found were small, in little pots, and then I finally stumbled upon one that was more like a tree.” It lives in her studio, along with this poster from the shop KIOSK. “They always have a nice range of things they get either from traveling or from different artists.”
Among the goods Fox designed in collaboration with Hawkins New York is this “super-soft and cuddly” alpaca throw hand-woven in Peru. Hanging to the left: “I get my mung bean noodles in that pink thing. I was just stringing stuff together one day. It’s such a great pink. I love packing materials and what food comes in. I save everything. The color’s always really great. It provides a lot of inspiration.”
Fox’s studio. On the rack are clothing samples, though not necessarily made from the printed or woven fabrics she’ll be using. The one-size-fits-most pieces will be “all about layering, so you can wear them in any season. They’re very textural, a lot of gauze, linen, natural fabrics that look good crinkly as well as crisp.” No dry cleaning or ironing necessary, though she notes, “my grandma would be pleased to iron them, with starch.” On the desk in back are Fox’s medium format camera and her father’s old 35-millimeter Nikon. She’s looking forward to shooting her collection on film.
A sketch on Fox’s desk. Her process often begins in “a very ugly sketch book, with a hodgepodge of random stuff.” But her “number one resource is the camera on my iPhone. I’m constantly taking pictures and I’ll go back and look for colors, shapes, forms, and then I start with sketching at my table and scanning into the computer. When I start things, it’s often a lot of color and it’s busy. I tend to pile a lot of information on at first and then strip away to what needs to be there.”
The table in her studio where she keeps paints, pastels, crayons, and far left, a Lonely Little Fox pencil box she had growing up. “I have the cheapest colored pencils in the world, all my watercolors are from Walgreens. I’m a firm believer you can use almost anything.” If she could have one thing always on hand: “I would love a perfectly sharpened pencil, and I never have it.”
Packing materials and scraps are tucked in this little wall shelf as references for shape, texture and color. Fox looks to a number of other artists and designers for inspiration, but there are two in particular: British sculptor Rachel Whiteread, whose plaster, resin, and concrete casts of architectural and household elements, “make you look at the space of things differently.” And the Dutch designer Hella Jongerius, who creates “really fun, odd things. From couches to plates. I would love to follow her career path.” Fox’s leather bracelet here is by Lauren Manoogian.
A dish of pins next to Fox’s sewing machine. When it comes to designing and wearing clothes, Fox says she has “zero interest” in keeping up with the relentless cycles of the fashion industry. She favors designers like Apiece Apart and Jesse Kamm, and loves “the idea of a minimalist closet and things that can be worn season after season.”
“Little flag pendants” made of seed beads that will hang on thin cording, part of Fox’s line. For these pieces, Fox has partnered with Indego Africa a non-profit supporting fair trade and sustainable income for artisan cooperatives in Rwanda.
Fox’s five-year-old mutt, Stache. “He’s my studio mate, he’s probably there half the day. I never had a pet growing up, so I didn’t know what to expect, but the minute I saw him, it was something fierce. I told him he has to live to be at least 25.” Stache is sniffing the prototype of a rug that will be part of Fox’s collection, available in two different colorways.
“I get a lot of inspiration for color from the bookshelf in our bedroom. All these books lined up, colors stacked on top of each other, that I wouldn’t necessarily think to put together.” Fox found this recycled leather rug on Fab.com a couple of years ago; the mustard-colored blanket on the bed is from Unison in Chicago.
A cactus on the bookcase in the bedroom. “Sometimes plants really speak to me. And my husband’s like, keep walking, keep walking, we don’t need more plants. But I love this shape.”
“I love rugs and wanted to find one that looked like a painting to hang above our bed.” After Googling “vintage Boucherouite rug,” Fox landed on this bright number from the ‘80s. The swing arm lamp is made by Los Angeles-based furniture and lighting designer Brendan Ravenhill.
Looking up at the single-pitch roof. Fox’s thoughts on building her own house? “Had I been married to someone else I might have thought, this seems crazy. But my husband’s father built all three houses that they lived in, taught himself how to do plumbing and electrical, and then my brother-in-law, who is a contractor, did the same thing four or five years before us. When we were planing three miles’ worth of wood — it was like four months of cutting the wood down to 2x2s and then sanding and planing it — I was crying, it was terrible! But now I think back and it was totally worth it.”
When not in use, the fireplace doubles as a shelf for plants, both on Kaleido trays designed by Clara von Zweigbergk. The little wood bowl on the left is a birthday gift from her friend, designer Caitlin Mociun. The two got to know each other after Fox sent Mociun some fan mail. “I loved what she was doing, we started emailing and then I photographed one of her collections five or six years ago.” The piece in the back, by ceramicist Morgan Peck, also came from Mociun’s shop.
A cubby in the living area’s brick wall is home to a rotating display. At left, little wood pieces that “look like farming tools or architect tools,” which Fox found at Uncommon Objects, a vintage shop in Austin. At center, a plaster cube Fox created as part of the Treasury Project. Like micro time capsules, the boxes hold bits of debris Fox collected when constructing the house. The frame on the right contains a piece from a side project. Fox has been recycling packing materials she gets in the mail, then “cutting and folding them, making weird, architectural shapes, some look like folded dresses, some like bird wings.”
On the dining table, Fox’s brass and copper geometric coasters, reflecting the grain of the wood ceiling. A mix of form and function, they double as décor, popping up on walls, too. “I’ve been hanging them all throughout our house. I love metal and I love weird shapes.” A selection is up now at Hawkins New York with more to come when she launches her line.
“Part of my creative process,” says Fox, “is snacking non-stop. The fridge calls me. Cheese calls me.” All the harder to resist those calls when your kitchen looks like this. Fox had been holding onto the long metal sink for several years before building the house, waiting to find a proper spot for it. Navy cabinets break up the neutrals, as do accents like the vintage metal pendant lamps Fox nabbed on eBay and a neon pink Lucite bowl shaped like a candy wrapper. The “weird orbs” at upper left are part of puzzle/art object from the ‘60s Fox found at a garage sale.
The steel-cased windows make the most of the natural light — “during the day there’s never a lamp on” — and the fluorescent tubes above rarely “get turned on because they blast you out of the house.” By the green rocking chair, from CB2, is a wooden stool from Fox’s upcoming line. Just behind, is a Lucite Kartell chair Fox picked up in Austin. “I’ve always been drawn to anything Lucite, and depending on the time of day, that chair changes colors. Sometimes it almost looks black or a nice green.”
Growing up as an “army brat,” Fox moved every seven years or so, living in Texas, Florida, and Germany. “I loved moving, my sister hated it. Whenever my dad got a new assignment, he’d take us out to eat and say, ‘Well, we’re gonna be going to…’ and my sister would cry and I’d be all excited. I kind of have a seven-year itch for having new experiences, new surroundings.” And now that she’s settled in here? “Maybe I can get that through traveling?”
Fox’s friend Jenny Gordy, designer of the clothing and accessories line Wiksten, made this dreamcatcher, which hangs on the closet door in one of the guest bedrooms. “I bought something from her collection and she included it for me, which I thought was really sweet.”
Fox admits to being “afraid of color on the walls,” but is really happy with the bright blue pocket door in the bathroom. Nine months out of the year this shower competes with an outdoor one, a wishlist item Fox refused to budge on when it came to their new home. Though they can’t see their nearest neighbors from their property, “I’m sure one day the UPS guy is going to come up to the house when we’re naked,” she laughs.
With Stache, in one of the guest bedrooms. “Our house is very minimalist. I think my brain needs that. But, then I walk into my best friend’s house and it is covered with stuff and I love that too.” Here, Fox keeps things beautifully spare with an Ikea bed that “looks like a Donald Judd piece, which is why we liked it.” The blue blanket, like the mustard one in the master bedroom, is from Unison.
When Fox decided to move to the country, “all of my friends were like, ‘Oh my god, I can’t believe you’re doing this.’ But we’re homebodies. We like to be at home, we like to be making and working, and fortunately we get to be working on stuff we generally like to do.” And friends from town stay over at least every few months. “I love having a space for that. We always tell people if y’all ever need to get away we have two bedrooms, just let us know!”
If we had to sum up our favorite kind of designer in a just a few brief sentences, it might read something like Alyson Fox’s biography: “I like making things from paper, found objects, thread, furniture, and plaster. I like designing things for commercial ends and designing things for no end at all. I have a degree in photography and an MFA where I focused on many mediums. I am inspired by hardware stores, building sites, empty rooms, people’s messes, stories, fabric, and quiet days.” But while we had some inkling of the Austin designer’s multidisciplinary chops — from girly-tough jewelry to patterned editions for the likes of West Elm — we weren’t aware of her artier inclinations until only recently. Those include a fantastic photo series documenting the textiles people use to cover up outdoor plant life when the weather gets cold, as well as our most recent discovery: a series of 1.5x1.5-inch plaster cubes, each one embedded with bits Fox and her husband found on the 5-acre plot where they last year built a house from scratch.
Many artists claim to need restriction in order to thrive — Matthew Barney famously made a series around the subject — and find the idea of freedom paralyzing, like standing at the edge of a vast creative abyss. Vancouver native Monika Wyndham, on the other hand, seems to be energized by endless possibility. In February, she left a full-time position art-directing interiors for the Canadian clothing chain Aritzia to move to Brooklyn and freelance, and she's taken to the professional vacuum with a kind of giddy abandon, flitting among dozens of ideas she finally has time to follow through on — even if she's unsure as to what end. And then there's the high she gets from losing herself in one of her biggest sources of artistic fodder: Google Images. "It’s just baffling to me how much information exists on the internet, and the fact that you can enter funny combinations of words and yield the most insane multitude of search results," she muses.
Caitlin Mociun may have been the author of a cult-hit fashion line for only a few years, but the lessons she learned from that stint — about the way she wants a customer to feel, or about the way a body moves in space — inform nearly everything she does today. That first becomes clear when she talks about her massively successful fine jewelry line, which she launched almost as a palliative to her days as a clothing designer. “I never really liked doing my clothing line, and when I switched to jewelry it was such a different response,” Mociun told me earlier this fall when I visited her year-old Williamsburg boutique. “It seemed to make people feel good about themselves as opposed to clothing, which often makes people feel bad.” But it’s when she talks about her boutique that you realize that nothing in the shop could be the way it is if Mociun weren’t first a designer.
