Mother-Daughter Paper Fashion Designers to Create Crewcuts Collection

Updated on 12/10/2014 at 4:23 PM

Dreams really do come true for one little aspiring designer! Remember Angie and Mayhem, the mother-daughter duo behind Fashion by Mayhem who turn leftover construction paper into high-fashion-inspired gowns? Well, their creations are about to evolve from construction paper fantasies to fabric reality thanks to the creative team at Crewcuts, J.Crew's children's division. Four-year-old Mayhem is lending her arts-and-crafts talents to a nine-piece Summer 2015 capsule collection that will include t-shirts, rompers, dresses, scarves, shoes, and jewelry — all starting at $23 and priced under $100.

After seeing the duo's creativity in re-creating Met Gala gowns of the past (and present) for Vogue earlier this year, J.Crew president and executive creative director Jenna Lyons contacted them in Ohio and invited them to meet with the company's childrenswear division. "[Mayhem's] styles and her creativity are really evolved and kind of amazing for a 4-year-old," said Jenny Cooper, Crewcuts' head of design. The team used paper, tape, and a large selection of jewels to design their creations and then watched as the company's designers and patternmakers turned them into wearable pieces that will hit store shelves this Spring.

Read on to see the creative process at work and hear why Jenny Cooper is so enthused about this collaboration, then stay tuned for a peek at Mayhem's actual creations — they'll be available for sale this May!

"When you have a conversation with her, you don't really believe that she's four," Cooper told us. "Her aesthetic decisions and the way that she works are kind of amazing. It's kind of weird to say the word 'working' talking about a 4-year-old. But she does it in a really sort of unusual way. And then she's also a 4-year-old, like she'll fall asleep at 4pm."

"I think her parents have done a really wonderful job of helping her, of sort of listening to her and saying, 'What do you want to do?'"

"She came into my office and spent a morning, and I watched her making things. She would make herself a dress, and she'd work out different formats that work for her and just sort of involve them," Cooper continued. "But she put the stones — we gave her a jar of stones and sequins and sort of beads and things to play with — and the patterns that she made are very sophisticated for a child. You'll see!"

"She works in 3-D. She doesn't do drawings as much. She doesn't translate a 3-D thing to a drawing, so we did that later for her. She would actually take paper and take 3-D items and turn them into something."

"We gave her some gold wrapping tape, and she wrapped it around her foot to make a shoe," Cooper told us. And she made the sole for the shoe, and she put tissue paper around her foot — she just figured out these different ways of making garments, making clothing out of paper and things that are available to her."

"[The collection is] nine pieces. There’s a shoe, there's a necklace she made herself, there's a headband that she made herself when she was here. She took one of our dresses and wrapped and put it on our mannequin when she came to visit us — this was the first time she had seen a mannequin her size, because we have them here to make kids’ clothes. So she took things that we had and turned it into her own."

"It’s been really amazing to work with a 4-year-old," Cooper said of the experience has a whole.