doorway to a dream

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ABOUT THE DESIGNER

Brenda Cox Giguere is a California-based writer, artist, and designer.  Her creative life is currently centered around a fictional character named Reverie Larke, a travel writer living in Manhattan who becomes an heiress and a target of danger almost overnight.   

“It’s inspirational and fun for me to work this way, a device for me to explore a variety of media,” she explains.  “It allows me to investigate a wide variety of interests.  The character I am writing about is also my fashion design muse.  My projects all relate to one another because they address a single fictional construct.”

Of the various categories of her work, two are central.  First are the design and creation of completely original couture and accessories in sixth-scale, forever known to the world as Barbie-doll size.  The equally-important second is her novel nearing completion.

“It has proven impossible through the years for me to select a single interest and just go for it,” she continues.  “You know... the decision ‘I’m going to dedicate myself only to such-and-such’.  Am I an artist?  Designer?  Writer?  By unifying my various interests this way, it gives me focus.  It means all of the wandering paths of my life’s pursuits now converge.  My efforts have more purpose, and because the core fictional aspect is built around the DNA of my dreams, the journey is always satisfying.”

Outsiders might find this approach perplexing at first, but eventually it all makes sense.  Who better than a glamorous, brilliant and introverted fictional heiress to enjoy a dream-world of luxury, fashion, travel, and intrigue?

“We all have certain themes running through our imaginations, whether we’re aware of it or not,” she says.  “My themes are what I want to explore in a variety of media… whether it’s my fascination with spy adventures when I was twelve, my love of certain books and movies, a thousand little idiosyncrasies.”

“Art and design are a big part of my background.  One of my lifetime hobbies has been to design clothes for fashion dolls.  I dabbled in it all my life, but eventually I realized how much I loved it and wanted to spend real time on it.”

“There was a hobby really taking off in the late Nineties,” she continues.  “It was, and is, facilitated by the Internet, the practice of treating fashion dolls as a canvas for art, fashion, and transformation.  You observe very quickly that in the fashion doll hobby world, these dolls serve as a surprisingly powerful fantasy extension of our selves.  When I’d design an ensemble for a doll, the idea would always be, I am wearing this, I am living this.  It’s the same thing when you’re writing an adventure, creating a world.  Sometimes it’s very specifically true, sometimes less obvious.”

“One of my Roads Not Taken was fashion design as a career.   I always had an aptitude for it, and in college I picked up some formal training when I was in my twenties, although I must say that like most designers I’ve learned a great deal by working on my own.  I also worked in theatrical costuming at that time, and earned a cosmetology license so I could work in a salon doing makeovers.  My interests have always overlapped."

“When I design miniature couture, I do it with all the seriousness and passion I would bring to bear if I were creating a human-size collection," she emphasizes.  "Many of the technical details are different, but for me the design criteria are the same.  I go about it the same way—inspiration, sourcing, sketching, draping, pattern drafting.  And I create accessories and even room settings as well… and why not?  Those dreams are big with me, too.  When each piece is done, I take photographs of my work… another one of my strong interests.  By creating stories and objects relating to this fictional character, there isn’t one of my artistic passions that doesn’t somehow come into play.”

In both the fashion designs and the fictional work, dreams are a strong recurring theme.

“Dreams have always fascinated me, and how the mind works.  In the early nineties I began to spend a lot of time learning about consciousness, dreaming, memory, creativity, psychology.  There was a terrific group of people working in a sleep lab at Stanford who were investigating lucid dreaming, which means knowing you're dreaming while it's happening, and I began spending time with them.  I brought my modest, amateur efforts to the field by writing a few articles, attending conferences, answering questions on television, even subjecting myself to some fascinating nights in a sleep chamber with electrodes stuck to my head.  It was really an amazing time.”

Even her career has been, in a way, the stuff of dreams.  In 1987 she walked away from over 13 years as a makeup artist and manicurist to work on a low-budget feature film.  “I recognized what a rare opportunity it was,” she recalls.  “I knew I had to go for it.  Francis Coppola was funding it, and jumped at the chance to prove myself.  So I quit my comfortable little business and began designing all the costumes and makeup for Clownhouse.  From this project I was able to find my way into my next career… various art services for high-end corporate media."

This life-altering opportunity proved to be a good one.  "For many of the same reasons my hobbies are so satisfying, this work has been incredibly satisfying, too… it allows me to do a diverse but related array of freelance jobs”.

This is where Brenda Cox Giguere has built her reputation as a costumer and stylist, makeup artist, set decorator, and occasional scriptwriter. 

“Writing a little script for a software company video is one thing, but I always wanted to write fiction.  When my fashion doll hobby was first becoming big in my imagination, I found myself wondering about various other creative avenues.  When my fictional heroine Reverie Larke and her friends showed up, at first I played around with staging photo scenarios with dolls in elaborate sets.  The idea was very appealing to me.  I saw it as a kind of filmmaking process, but it was very time-intensive and ultimately limiting.  I also thought about doing Regarding Reverie as a graphic novel, almost like storyboarding a movie."

Eventually, the story's destiny revealed itself.  "What I eventually realized was I was sneaking up on my lifetime dream of creating a work of long fiction.  When this realization sunk in, I’d already begun writing it as a light story for my doll group.  So I revamped what I’d done and turned it into serious fiction.”

The novel was originally published online to a small group of readers in serialized form over several years. Originally called Regarding Reverie, the elaborate tale incorporates intrigue, travel, and adventure, psychology, art, and dreams… even virtual reality.  The novel is undergoing its final revision prior to publication in book form. 

“This online serialized format worked well for me.  Because the story had readers even before the work was completed, I’ve been dedicated to the project, and really stayed with it.”

Life still brings the unexpected, however.  “A recent international doll fashion design competition came as a surprise.  It was an exciting opportunity that meant I had to leave all those daily hours of writing behind for a while, which made me nervous,” she admits. 

“But I love expressing real design through doll couture more than anyone will ever know… I’ve had dreams about it all my life.  So I did my best to make it a valuable part of my journey.”

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Brenda Cox Giguere has studied various aspects of art and design with many important California Bay Area luminaries including couture clothing and accessories designer Kenneth King (King has created pieces for Elton John and others); Visionary Movement artist Norman Stiegelmeyer [late]; ribbon and fiber artist Candace Kling (Kling has created sculptural hats for Whoopie Goldberg's character in Star Trek, and others); lithograph artist George Miyasaki; and Abstract Expressionist Karl Kasten.