Todd Oldham can recall the precise moment he lost interest in fashion. It was back in 1997, and he was working on an emerald green silk satin shift that Cindy Crawford would wear in his spring runway show. The dress looked sweet and simple, but its construction was anything but. With ribbon straps made in France and fabric woven in South Korea, the piece was silk-screened with a print of a cherry tree made by Mr. Oldham on acetate, over which the designer painted a spray of cherry blossoms that were embroidered with freshwater pearls back in Texas, where his clothes were put together in his family's factory.
The whole endeavor, Mr. Oldham said, "involved so many countries and so much time and so much expense, I thought: 'This is i nsane. What do I have rather than the bother to bother?' It felt like maybe I should be doing something else with my time."
With that, he closed up his wholesale collection business. Not that it was a surprise, exactly, that he would pull the plug at some point. The designer had always chafed at the primary engine of fashion, which is to render one's product obsolete every six months. And he was making so many other things, so well: furniture, fabric and housewares; interiors and television shows and photographs and books.
Photo Left, Todd Oldham with Cindy Crawford at the conclusion of his fall 1994 show. Credit G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times
As the host of Todd Time, a three-minute D.I.Y. session on MTV's "House of Style," he was also teaching a generation how to make just about anything, using flea market finds, perhaps a bit of rickrack, a glue gun, a stapler and a pair of sharp scissors. (He also occasionally dipped into fashion reporting, at one point interviewing a young up-and-coming designer by the name of John Galliano.)
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"All I did was stop doing the one thing," Mr. Oldham said, "and the one thing was real loud, so it looked different on the outside than it did to me. Fashion is very noisy, and it kind of sticks with people in funny ways, considering it's this ephemeral thing we often just toss under the bed or in the dryer."
Fashion is noisy, and Mr. Oldham had a lively run with it. His clothes were inspired by pot holders or wallpaper or kitschy paint-by-numbers paintings or garage sale treasures — toasters, gilded mirrors, loopy printed upholstery — all expressed in exuberant colors on cut velvet and silks, with trompe l'oeil effects that were the re sult of elaborate printing techniques, intricate beading, appliqués and embroidery.
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His clothes were fun, but they were also beautiful, and his shows were like dance parties, packed with the coolest kids, both on the runway and in the audience: drag performers like Billy Beyond and RuPaul; old-fashioned supermodels like Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell; and actors like Susan Sarandon, Rosie O'Donnell and Christian Slater. You might hear the theme song from "The Dating Game," or 1970s-era curiosities, like War's "Low Rider," and the models didn't stalk, stone-faced, down the runway. They skipped, jogged, shimmied and grinned, just as you did, watching them. It was a different era, to be sure.
"The fashion universe then was much smaller," said Simon Doonan, the author and creative ambassador of Barneys New York, "not the global spectator sport that it is now." Mr. Doonan, Mr. Oldham and Tony Longoria, Mr. Oldham's partner in business and life, and others were part of a loose tribe of artists and makers who used to roam the East Village and the downtown haunts in the '80s, armed with their wit and energy, and perhaps sporting Patsy Cline wigs, as they did en masse on one foray to the club Area.
They would camp in the apartment of their friend John Badum, in a living room Mr. Doonan had painted with vignettes that evoked a Victorian cabinet of curiosities, and dance so hard that the plaster fell from the ceiling of the apartment below. (Mr. Badum was the Go Sil k executive and Auntie Mame-like character who was killed in 1999.) Mr. Oldham described the Second Avenue apartment, lovingly, as "the weirdo clearinghouse."
"I think punk had liberated everybody, so postpunk there was this explosion of creativity," Mr. Doonan said. "There was tremendous eccentricity and idiosyncrasy, and because it was a smaller universe, people like Todd loomed large. He did fashion for a long time, and he expressed himself full throttle. It always made sense to me that he would move on."
Photo Todd Oldham, host of
Todd Time, a three-minute D.I.Y. session on MTV's "House of Style." Credit MTV
Kim Hastreiter, the founder and co-editor of Paper magazine, said: "I always felt like he was an artist who accidentally became a fashion designer. He accidentally made clothes, and it just ran away, like tumbleweeds. But it was all one thing, art and fashion and furniture and photographs." Mr. Oldham shot many photographs for Paper, including one memorable project in 2001 that featured, among other characters, Amy Sedaris in a platinum bouffant wig, faux sunburn and a cloud of white tulle, and Monica Lewinsky in a fully crocheted mise en scene.
As Richard Martin, the former curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, told Newsweek in 1995, "Todd can design a whole world."
At 53, Mr. Oldham is still a slight figure with the gentle Texas accent that so charmed New Yorkers in 1989, when he and Mr. Longoria moved here from Dallas. The two met when Mr. Oldham was 18 and Mr. Longoria, then a buyer at Neiman Marcus, was 25. Back then, Mr. Oldham was a skinny roller-skating kid with pink hair and out-of-scale clothes he had made himself by cutting up thrift store garments. His family church, as he put it, was the garage, where he and his three siblings learned to make everything, from shelving to their own clothes.
When Mr. Oldham began to sell his work, it made sense that the business would be a family affair: His broth er, Brad, made the buttons, cunning works of art of cast resin and porcelain; his grandmother Mildred handled quality control; his parents, Jack and Linda, were his financial partners, and Linda also ran the factory. Once Todd Oldham Studio shook off the fashion business, it remained a multifaceted design company, and it is still family-run.
In the last 15 years, to tick off just a handful of his more notable projects, Mr. Oldham has been the creative director of Old Navy, revamped furniture for La-Z-Boy and made products for Target, FTD and Fishs Eddy, among other companies. He has produced 21 books with Ammo Books, including monographs on Joan Jett, Alexander Girard and Charley Harper, a modernist nature illustrator whose work Mr. Oldham championed in the last years of Mr. Harper's life (he died in 2007, at 84).
Dearest to Mr. Oldham's heart are his craft lines, Kid Made Modern and Hand Made Modern (for grown-ups): kits and supplies sold at Target and, by the end of this year, the gift shops at the Brooklyn, Getty and Guggenheim Museums, as well as the Museum of Modern Art, that spread his gospel of D.I.Y. You can see his Kid Made how-to videos — how to make beaded flowers, say, or a robot of anodized wire — on YouTube.
"It's a very precious thing to me," Mr. Oldham said. "It's about teaching people to make stuff and giving them the tools to do so." And he is delighted, he added, "to be in businesses my name is not on."
Photo The designer Todd Oldham poses for a portrait in his studio in January 1992 in New York City. Credit Catherine McGann/Getty Images
Mr. Oldham may have walked away from fashion, but he was meticulous about archiving his work in that medium. "We never had a sample sale," he said. Over the last few years, he has been donating that work, to the Costume Institute at the Met and a handful of design schools, he said, including the Rhode Island School of Design. He has had a long association there as a guest lecturer, and in 2014, the school awarded him an honorary doctorate, a tribute that amused and stunned him, he said, because he felt as if he barely made it out of high school.
In April, RISD's museum will present a retrospective of his designs, 60 or so pieces restyled by Mr. Oldham so that each outfit will be a mix of elements from different years. It is his aim to remove, as h e put it, "that Hard Rock Cafe-quality of most museum fashion exhibitions." He had hoped to cover the museum's floor with an acre's worth of fluorescent green aquarium gravel, but because of technical difficulties is now planning on paillettes.
"I thought I was done with clothes, so to revisit them has been a joy," he said. "It wasn't melancholy at all. They were made much more beautifully than I remember. All you remember at the time is what went wrong."
Mr. Oldham will make one piece for the show, a full-skirted dress from 20 yards of muslin that his RISD textile students silk-screened last spring. He spread the stiff, densely textured and multihued fabric out on the floor of his studio in the financial district and demonstrated how the mate rial will be gathered without having to be cut. "I have to set up rules or I float away," he said. "It's the first and only dress I've made in a long time."
That's not entirely correct. He never stopped making clothes for his friends, particularly Ms. Sedaris, the humorist and actress, who is perhaps as crafty as Mr. Oldham. They have been collaborators since he saw her in the wonderfully demented, late-'90s Comedy Central series "Strangers With Candy," and asked her if he could photograph her.
Over the years, he has built Ms. Sedaris hutches for her rabbits, a screen door for her bedroom, all manner of furniture, flooring, cabinets, chair covers, skirts and jeans. These last items h e "builds" out of old Levi's he buys at thrift stores and then deconstructs. Ms. Sedaris gets a new pair every year, along with skirts he makes from Halloween fabric (printed with bats, for example) he buys at Kmart. For her part, Ms. Sedaris makes Mr. Oldham ghosts out of tissue paper and sometimes pot holders.
"I can't think of anything he hasn't made me," Ms. Sedaris said. "He'd come over and always want to do something, so I learned to put together a really good tool kit. I'd rather lay on my back and talk." Recently, he is less restless, which is a good thing, she added, "because I don't have anything left for him to do. He's made it all perfect.� �
