Cinderella had her glass slippers, and Ramona Sonin had her white go-go boots. “I was about 5 years old, and my mom got me my first pair of white go-go boots,” she says, “and it was over. I wore those boots everywhere and everything became about those boots. Magic happened, I think, with a 5-year-old ready to take on the world walking in her go-go boots.”
It was from that moment — if she had to choose a moment — she discovered her love of fashion. “It’s just kind of something you’re born with.”
Today, Sonin channels her passion into designing couture dresses with sculptured bodices and tulle that pours, almost floats, out of the skirt in her latest exhibition of gowns at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens. “There’s no machine involved,” she says. “Everything you see is completely hand-stitched, and so each gown and each couture piece you see is at least 300 hours of work a piece.”
Though Sonin starts with a sketch outlining her general idea, once she approaches the dress form, improv and intuition take over, and the piece takes on a life of its own, thirsting for the artist’s creativity to feed and care for it. “I just kind of sculpt it on the body and on the form, … and all of a sudden I’m breathing life into these things,” she says, before referencing a quote from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein that goes: “With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.”
What lays at Sonin’s feet are the pieces of fabric already in her studio, which she upcycles into a fabric of her own to piece together and make three-dimensional appliques. For one gown in the show, Ophelia, she even uses fabric from her own wedding dress, showing that though the histories of her materials may come from vulnerable, some even forgotten, moments, these moments came together in support of this new creation, in support of the potential wearer. “The history of the material, there’s power and strength in that,” she says.
At first glance, the dresses may seem overly delicate with their muted colors, tulle, sequins, and the embellishments that seem to have fallen in the perfect place, but they have a bit of “edge” to them, an ephemeral quality that’s haunting and intimidating. The gowns’ fragility is an armor in itself; it’s untouchable. As Sonin says, her gowns are a blend of “Viking shields and Brigitte Bardot.”
Sonin also takes inspiration from other recognizable women, specifically Shakespearean women after whom she titles her gowns. “In what Shakespeare did,” she says, “many of the women were notable and very strong and powerful and free-thinking in a time where society actually commanded them to be delicate. Shakespeare’s women played both of those, that struggle between power and femininity.”
And yet Shakespeare’s women, just like Sonin’s dresses, find power in the feminine.
“Flowerful: Fashioning the Armored Feminine,” Dixon Gallery & Gardens, on display through October 23.