INTERVIEW
MARÍA ROMERO
Knowing María Romero is to know energy. It is a current which flows through the plants she uses in her fabric dye, the tailoring of her designs, and the ways she gathers friends and strangers alike to share food and experiences.
Tintorería is María’s dye and garment design project with a core collection aptly named El Closet - for the only elements one’s wardrobe could possibly need, the naturally dyed, thoughtfully crafted pant, jacket, shirt and jumper.
Longview: Having recently returned to New York City full time after a period living upriver in the Hudson Valley, how do you adjust to this shift of energies and surroundings?
María: It has not been easy, I do think I am a better person - to myself -, when I have nature available, and my years upstate were such a fantasy as nature was right there. I guess my childhood in Galicia has made this contact with nature a necessity for my own well being for the rest of my life.
But I also love the chaos of living in a major city such as New York. Looking at the sky grounds me, it always has, it makes me realize how small I am compared to the universe, a humbling feeling that calms me. And luckily New York is a place where, despite all the lights, every night the stars show up and I can find them if I need them.
L: How do you relate to the seasonal cycles?
M: I love seasons, I don’t think I could live in a place where they don’t exist. - Eating seasonal produce is so important for me, that’s how I grew up. Seasons give me a sense of time, and allow my body to do its job on each of them. Being connected to seasonal cycles gives me a better sense of life and my presence in the world.
L: Do you have a favorite season, or time of day? Are there any rituals you connect with this time?
M: I love the beginning of all seasons, especially spring and fall. As per rituals - the beginning of summer, the night of Saint John on June 23rd, the shortest night of the year - I gather new and old friends and we gather around a fire, collect herbs, make bundles, wishes, jump the fire and get rid of all the things we don’t want anymore, to welcome the ones we want.
L: What do you think of as your plant community?
M: They are the best. I love my plant community, the way they are - it feels like they move gentler than anybody else, they listen so well, and observe as if they could see through everything. I like to be around people who are connected and can nurture and care for life. It feels right.
L: Do you turn to plants for medicine, cooking or healing? Or for something else?
M: I do, I love using Moxibustion (mudworth) for body pain, I drink saffron tea when I am anxious, do eucalyptus steams when I am congested, and for cooking, bay leaves are always around.
L: Describe your dream garden.(Or a garden from a dream?!)
M: A gathering space with a framework for engagement, anywhere can be a garden, a garden of my own.
If I were to describe it, it would be a very similar space to the mulberry, inside where I used to have my afternoon meals as a child. It’s a circle; I love how energy flows in a circle set-up. The light comes from the top and it sparkles when entering the garden, I am barefoot and the ground feels cold. I like to think of this garden as a secret place, a garden only I can see. It feels safe and quiet, sometimes it changes and it feels like a new place, but the feeling is always the same, home. Where there’s home, there’s a garden and where there’s a garden there’s home.
L: You mentioned to us a while ago that you felt so lucky you have designed the perfect collection of clothing for the very much nomadic lifestyle you have enjoyed/ endured over the last few months! These main garments are both hardy, precise, no fuss, elegant and a celebration of life all at once, very much like yourself. How did you find yourself on the path of natural dyeing and clothing design?
M: Since I was a child I wanted to be a fashion designer and live in New York. It has been a process to get here, but the other day I realized I am who I wanted to be when I was little and that was sweet to acknowledge.
I studied Textil Design in Mexico City - as I wanted to understand how fabric is made and it works before starting designing clothin. Then I moved to Milan to do my fashion design degree. After that, in between Milan and New York my career specialized in menswear tailor clothing. The Milan years were beautiful, with amazing fabrics and exceptional tailoring. New York was different, we were designing money not clothes.
Because of my visa status I was stuck to this work position that was not aligned with me or my values, but I am grateful for these years also, because they gave me the time to explore and understand who I was as a designer and what could I do with what I was good at, to create things that make sense for the world we have today.
So after work I started back to crochet, knit, weave, and I got a small floor loom, and started experimenting. That is when I decided I wanted to take a break from fashion and go back to textiles; I founded my own textile studio and started working in the Oaxaca Valley, weaving textiles for the home. All the fibers were Mexican wool and alpaca. The artisans I worked with used natural dyes and I started learning with them. I learned about food waste as a natural dye through different natural dyers such as Rebecca Desnos, took classes at TAC and got many books and started trying.
I love processes and I love cooking, and dyeing is very similar to the process of cooking - it is not always that the same recipe tastes the same. Both the family I worked with in the Valley and I learned a lot together, we were teaching each other something that we were not experts on. -Not all artisans in Oaxaca use natural dyes even though they will say the textiles they sell in the market are naturally dyed. The older generations surely did, but with the arrival of synthetic dyes the younger generations abandoned natural dyes, because of costs, labor and time. The artisans I collaborate with me re-took their grandparents heritage and started using the natural color available in the Valley, such as marigolds, cochineal, indigo and organ cactus, I was dyeing in Brooklyn, finding other sources of color to use when we needed yellow but ran out of marigolds, so we had the alternative to use onion skins.
When I launched the textiles in New York in 2017 - I got a slap in the face and I realized how much there is to say about the processes that textiles go through prior to reaching the market, as there are so many lies around handcrafted textiles and much confusion for the consumer and the makers.
So I started Tintorería - I divided my studio in two, on one side were my textiles and on the other a small kitchen for color. It started as a donation based project in which people could drop off their garments to be recolored like a dry cleaner for color. I partnered with local restaurants and also used a lot of resources from NYC parks to gather dyestuff such as acorns in the fall.
I started doing a shade of the month, so people could bring their garments, learn a bit of the process, see my textiles and have a better knowledge of what we were doing in Oaxaca. Now that they had a piece they loved in their hand so they were listening! Many people were interested but not all could access the services as natural dyes only yield in natural fibers, and for many people all they had with natural fiber base in their closets were t-shirts or socks. Second slap in the face! -It is not just the processes that people don’t think of, also the fiber.
How can one not think of that? Textiles surround us in our spaces and bodies 24/7 - that is when I saw there was a need to create a closet of garments made only from natural materials, natural color with a good fit. Easy, elegant and flattering but also able to pass the test of time.
L: Do you have an early memory of being in a garden or around plants?
M: Yes, my grandmother (my father’s mother) loved plants, flowers and vegetable gardens. And she was also a tailor. In her house there was everything, a field of corn - the best place to play hide and seek -, tomatoes, lettuce, apple trees, she even had an avocado tree she planted from a seed she took back to Spain from Mexico in the 80’s. Then there were roses, hydrangeas, she had the most beautiful chestnut tree, lemon trees that I loved to climb in to pick lemons and they always left my legs scratched. I loved having my afternoon meal inside the mulberry tree, his dripping branches full of leaves made me feel I was in a secret garden, with endless raspberries around.
L: How would you describe your relationship today with nature / the natural world?
M: It is my grounding environment, the place I go when I am out of breath.
L: In what ways, if any, does the natural world shape your work or the way you work?
M: In many. To start, most of the fibers I use are cellulose fibers, meaning they come from plants. Most of the dyes used in my garments are also from plants, roots or byproducts of food, the only exception is cochineal which is an insect.
As a result of using natural fibers and dyes, and tailoring, my product feels effortless, easy and can live anywhere it is taken.
L: Which plant materials do you find yourself often drawn towards in your creative process, as well as in your daily life?
M: I love seeing the life of a flower happen in front of me, from seed - sprout - to bloom - to death of a flower, ’the last dance‘. I find that ephemeral beauty so inspiring and once again so grounding, it is like watching life in fast motion.
In my daily life I like to have some natural presence inside my home. If I have fresh flowers after the ‘last dance’ I dried them and some I use for dyeing if they give color, others just hang with me until we are too many and some have to leave. I now have a tree in my living room that came from Etvernal Studio. He was really stressed when he arrived, and now he grows by the day. I dream of him finding his way through the house, he is doing a great job, I let him know everyday how inspired I am by him.