My palace in Dallas – Melissa Ann Taylor

“Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences – wherever you happened to be”

— Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism

Hi friends, as winter comes to a near end and spring lurks around the corner, how are we doing? Did your year start out as you hoped to be? If you’re reading this I hope you are as excited for what’s to come your way and enjoying everything that is around you — People and space alike, especially your home. Has your space changed since last year? Did it feel more like home to you?

I started My Palace in Dallas during the height of the pandemic, and it was born from pure curiosity: I want to know, I want to see, and, most importantly, I want to document what the people around me have become after these unprecedented years. They can be artists, comedians, or they can also be the people you meet on the street—which is quite hard cause supposedly people in Dallas don’t walk at all. So, what is it that they do? This project delves into their stories and, as the name suggests, explores their Palace in Dallas.

Without further ado, allow me to introduce you to Melissa Ann Taylor. A talented designer who sculpts and hand dyes carefully sourced fabric into dreamy, brooding clothing with a powerful physical presence. I worked on her SS23 show: Ghost as a backstage photographer and fell in love with her approach to design and how hard she worked on bringing couture design into the Dallas scene. We talked about how she settled into her new place, what that journey was like wearing many different hats, and what inspired her as a designer and most important of all, a human.

Hello Melissa! Always a good time running into you, congratulations on moving into your place for over a year now! Before I bomb you with questions, would you like to tell people a bit about yourself? Who are you and what is it that you do?

I am a mens and womenswear designer in Dallas, TX. I currently work for Dallas couturier Mackenzie Brittingham making custom gowns, and I’m independently developing my own line of RTW. In the last few years I’ve put on a handful of runway productions to showcase my line, which has been an incredible amount of work but so much fun, and has allowed me to collaborate with an amazing assortment of other creatives in both Austin and Dallas.

From pattern maker, model, runway show producer, production seamstress, and designer of your show, you’ve done so much with so many till now! Could you tell me what the journey was like for you? How did you get to where you are now?

It’s been such a long journey and I have often felt imposter syndrome and unsatisfied with where I’m at, but I think that comes with the nature of being an artist.

Since I was a child, clothing has been a powerful and essential tool of self-expression for me. However, I went into studio arts when I was in college probably both because I’ve always identified first and foremost as an artist, and because I was intimated by the materialism and body standards of the fashion industry. In college, I experimented with a lot of different media including glass blowing, ceramics, and sculpture, and in my senior year, I created an independent study combination of mixed media bookmaking and doll making. In the end, I realized I was attracted to dolls more as an entryway into creating something expressive for the human body. Eventually, I realized I had to pick one media to stick with if I was ever going to master anything, and making clothing was the only medium I could exclusively dedicate myself to with no regrets.

(If I could have a do-over and had to pick something else, it would be filmmaking! I think my early book-making points to my interest in that kind of progressive narrative, and I still consider the film to be one of my most fundamental sources of inspiration outside of daily life.)

Your mood can change so dramatically based on what you’re wearing. Clothing can help make someone more confident and feel more grounded in themselves. When people find out I’m a designer I get a lot of disclaimers about the way they dress, often saying they aren’t fashionable or they think XYZ is cool but they can’t pull it off. But everyone and I mean EVERYONE says a lot about themselves based on what they're wearing whether they realize it or not. I love being able to contribute to something this powerful and give people a tool to help them say what they want to about themselves and even see themselves as the person they want to be.

A lot of my fashion education has been self-study on top of a handful of crash courses from Austin School of Fashion Design at the beginning of my career to one-on-one lessons via Zoom during the pandemic with Savile Row tailor Lee Marsh. These days there are a lot of resources on the internet including YouTube videos and podcasts like Fashion Half Cut that helped me feel attached to a community of people with vast experience, but the other side of it is that there is no substitute for putting in the time and building the experience of trial and error. It’s been agonizing at times feeling like I’m going in circles trying to figure out how to solve fit issues, how to work with different fabrics, and how to push past my own comfort zones of silhouettes and styles, but there is nothing that can beat the satisfaction of wearing something I truly love that I designed myself, and realizing I am capable of making anything I want to (even though it’s still hard).

I think pursuing this passion on my own was a much harder route than I anticipated. It’s a difficult way to make a living, and it’s a highly competitive and highly specialized industry. From the outset, I was determined to do things my own way and not the way other people told me things had to be done, which was probably stupid, but one thing I have learned is that no one’s route to success in fashion is the same. And as an artist, if I’m not able to make the kind of work I personally am interested in, I’m going to die with a lot of regret.

Your journey had a recurring theme where your need for functionality stood out to me, after working on so many different mediums like ceramics and glassblowing, did these previous experiences help form your own definition of functionality on how clothes should be?

I think so. My idea for functionality is tied to how much time you are going to spend with something. For clothing, is it something I can wear on a daily basis, or is it something I can wear to do multiple things? For me, functionality isn’t just about aesthetics but it should allow you to go about your life with comfort and ease. I think of clothing as a tool in that regard. For example, if it’s something I put on and worry about messing it up to the extent it limits things I want to do, I find that to be non-functional.

When I was a kid I loved gowns, loved the movie Cinderella, and my dream was to make ball gowns. So as soon as I started going to formal in high school it was interesting to realize that I don’t particularly like wearing a gown! It’s a little uncomfortable, and I can’t do anything I want in it freely. It also feels like I’m pretending to live a fancier life than I do. A ball gown can make you feel special and detached from reality (and that’s kind of the point!), but I prefer to build a world around me that won’t hinder my movements. The funny thing is that my day job now is making couture gowns! It’s a delicious irony to me that the very thing I thought I was least interested in is exactly what life gave me, and it happens to be 9-year-old Melissa’s actual *Dream Come True* so for that reason I love it. (I also love the people I work with and love being a little black shadow working in a big, bright sparkly white cloud of an environment, so it’s been an unexpectedly delightful gift in my life.)

Once I started designing and realized I didn’t actually wear ball gowns IRL, this got me thinking, what other things do I actually like to wear? The first key pieces were hoodies and t-shirts which was all I wore at the time. My first collection was a series of cropped, color-blocked hoodies inspired by a weird blend of Edwardian jackets and My Little Pony aesthetics. It’s embarrassing looking at the pictures I took modeling them back then, but crazy enough, in some ways, nothing has changed and I kind of still stand by the concept even now!

Back to what functionality means to me, it’s something your body can move around in freely, endurable, and staple-tailored elements that allow you to dress up and dress down when needed. I ended up designing a line centered around Texas-grown and North Carolina-milled organic cotton for a long time. At first, I made shirts, dresses, skirts, and even jackets, but then started making underwear and bralettes most of all because they were selling pretty well for a while. Eventually, I lost interest in that line because I was sick of sewing hundreds of pairs of underwear, I didn’t know how to outsource in a way that kept the integrity of what I thought I was trying to do, and stopped being able to compete with other independent lingerie brands that had a better grasp on scaling a business. I totally burnt out and finally put a bullet to the whole thing which kind of felt like killing my own baby. I got pretty depressed over it, but I couldn’t keep going.

Around that time when I was mourning my failures and feeling very disillusioned (both professionally and personally!), I stumbled upon a movie called “Notebook on Cities and Clothes” by Wim Wenders about Yohji Yamamoto, which I don’t think I knew who that was at the time. The movie was Yohji in the mid-80s when he started to really hit success but was still pretty early on in his career. I watched the entire film with a painful knot in my throat and a disturbed feeling that stuck with me for days. That’s when I really understood for the first time how much I wanted to make more than just really nice t-shirts and underwear, and that fashion was truly the place where I could blend functionality with conceptual art and more personal expression in a complex cultural context. I realized despite how much I might hate and fear the commercialism and materialistic tendencies of the industry, there was nothing I wanted to do more with my life and the only reason I wasn’t committing to it was because of fear, and not lack of desire. I will say, that surviving a certain amount of catastrophic fails did help me realize failure and loss are actually not the worst thing in the world. The worst thing is not even trying.

You mentioned you’ve been putting on runway shows since your time in Austin and Dallas. When and how did that start during your time there?

My first runway show was in the Fall of 2017. My best friend Ida and I had been talking about doing a show together, but I kept getting cold feet from a lack of confidence. Nonetheless, she kept on encouraging me, and I committed, we worked together in Ida’s little studio space and my studio apartment, and we finished the entire process from conceptualization to opening in 6 weeks I think. It was an insanely short turnaround and looking back I’m not sure how I was able to do it, but I made 8-9 looks with a jacket I was really proud of while being absolutely stressed out. We were terrified that no one was going to come so we hung up a bunch of flyers and essentially begged everyone we knew to come to this free show. Ida’s parents catered it, our friend Ade helped us with production, and we had a couple of friends from the Hyperreal Film Club lend a hand with visuals, too.

It was a massive success. The venue, Mass Gallery, ended up literally overflowing with around 300 people. The feedback was incredible, with a lot of excitement from both fashion heads and people who had no experience with any kind of fashion scene. The positive response blew us both away, we got addicted to it and did a couple of more shows in Austin with the continued collaboration of Hyperreal Film Club and Ade Randle’s production assistance after that.

After moving to Dallas and taking a pandemically induced hiatus for a couple of years, I finally went and did my first-ever solo show around March 2022 in the garage space where we later met during my second Dallas show. I met an amazing team working on that show, too, including Bryon Lloyd and Justin Dougherty. They were all so professional to the point it was intimidating. The show was extremely ambitious under the circumstances, but we pulled it off together and I was really proud of that.

To give more credit, I was really lucky to have a good team of interns helping me with my second collection in Dallas, too, as well as some new additions this past winter working on my latest upcoming collection. My interns are more like apprentices/assistants/collaborators because we do all the difficult parts together instead of bullshit intern tasks like getting coffee and errands, tracing things, or whatever. We work together once a week and it feels like a little community brainstorming and figuring things out together.

Like how you’d be curious about their letterbox account when you meet a film fanatic, can you tell me what consists of your media outlet and where you usually get your inspiration from?

First of all, I try to keep only a peripheral view of what’s going on in fashion currently and not look at it directly in the eye. I don’t want to be too influenced by someone else's work that I like a lot because once I start chasing after that I will always be one step behind. For inspiration this past year I went on a lot of night walks around old East Dallas and my current neighborhood, and I pay attention to things in my life that give me a strong feeling of excitement or wistfulness. I try to focus on things that can stir emotion within, that’s usually where I pull from and put into my work.

Every collection I make, even though it’s clothing, I’m always trying to convey something that reflects whatever I’m mentally wrestling with at the time. It could be relationships, romance, a significant change in my worldview, or wrestling with mortality and the mystery of consciousness of our existence here. Concepts like this are hard to put into clothing, but it’s what I have an inherent desire to express.

It comes across in a very subtle way, usually, like the mood a color palette conveys, some symbolism, some motifs, patterns, or images. I’m always afraid I’m totally failing to convey what I’m thinking about, but I’ve been surprised to find how often the ideas I’m thinking about do get across in some way.

Right now my environment inspires me a lot. I read and I’ve been spending a lot of time on fish Reddit because I just got a fish tank and two gorgeous fish. I love reading about other people’s problems, the things that bother them in life, or asking about how we think about a certain matter. I listen to a lot of True Crimes, mysterious diseases, confusing emotions, and pretty goldfish pictures online. I guess mortality, confusion, and consciousness is taking up a big part of my mind. .

**How do you not get caught up in all these emotions that you consume?**

Sometimes I look at these things observing the way people find solutions to their problems. During a particularly hard period of my life, I had chronic insomnia and I watched every episode of My 600lbs Life. Unlike a lot of reality TV, I felt like that show did a great job realistically documenting a very intense struggle for lasting transformation that required delving into root problems for a very intensive level of self-awareness and commitment to self-responsibility which I still find inspiring. Seeing how people handle all kinds of stuff in life – True crime is a little too dark and I might need to lay off on that but it’s really good when you’re doing repetitive sewing – was part of my effort trying to understand myself as a human being.
There is a huge spectrum of possibilities of how people can become and I’m really fascinated by how far I can reach into that and understand more fully what a human being is and can be. I don’t know why it matters but as an artist, I’ve always been amazed by that and try to reflect that level of complexity in what I do. I find it both horrifying and incredibly beautiful.

It’s been three years since the pandemic hit and I’m glad to see both of us rose up and did many incredible things during and after. What did you do to stay centered and sane? Did any of those new habits carry over now that things are back to normal?

I developed a lot of good habits during the pandemic and mostly were carried over and became part of my routine. I got really serious about getting some morning sunlight in my everyday schedule.

I got laid off immediately when the pandemic started so I had to figure out a way to structure my day. Working for yourself it can be hard to enforce structure, which is so important as it helps get things done instead of spiraling. I realized that when you have all this time on your hands, breaking your day up and prioritizing your tasks – like me getting my morning sunlight – can be really impactful.

As an incredible designer like yourself, I’m sure you have your fair share of traveling experience and exposure to different art scenes across the states left alone countries. What do you think sets Dallas’ art scene apart from all the other huge art hubs like NY, LA, or any other city you’ve been to?

As far as cities in the US, I like the modernist and Art Deco industrial aesthetic undertones of the city. Dallas is also actually a little more diverse than I expected coming from Austin. As far as the fashion scene goes, it is tough because while Dallas does have its own sensibility on what clothing is, it might not be pushing the envelope as much as places like New York or other European cities. Nonetheless, Dallas does have a lot of interest in fashion. I’ve seen people respond well to the things I make. Maybe I’m justifying being in the place I’m in but I prefer to be in a city where I have a little more space to make an impact. Like I said I keep fashion in the peripheral and respond more to life, as an artist and designer I’m showing people the world I’m living in and don’t necessarily want to be strictly motivated by competition.

The downside is, there isn’t much industry here. It’s important to have a business you can scale up and go beyond just being a local designer. It’s hard not having many designers around to learn from, or to gain experience from adventurous fashion design companies that are successful. But I think Dallas does have a lot of potential and it’s a decently fun place to be in. There are definitely talented people here who are appreciative of fashion and arts and I want to give them something that is exciting and challenging.

Are you a Dallas native? As a designer residing in this city and having spent quite some time finding your creative identity, what do you think of this city?

I think having moved around so many different cities in my teenage years I learned to make the best of wherever you’re at. You have to find something that makes you happy, and there will always be someone you connect to.

I guess I do feel lonely sometimes in Dallas, especially as a woman in her late thirties. I don’t have nor want kids, and I don’t feel like there are a ton of people around my age I relate to or are easy to meet here. I tend to get along better with people who are younger than me, I think sometimes creatives here grew up and left the city and played a huge part in it too.

I’m making the best of it with my good friends, I love my apartment here, and I love the trees and plants around I like my neighborhood here too since it’s walkable in comparison to most of the other places here. I was really trying to leave Dallas for New York at the beginning of last year, but I also needed a job that would warrant me leaving and it’s hard to do so without an industry connection or go for an entry-level job at this point in my age and career.

I am happy I got to work at a job where I could learn, which was a huge part of why I wanted to go to New York. I was unexpectedly approached by Mackenzie Brittingham’s team and it’s probably one of the more interesting fashion jobs I could find here.

With my job now I got to do custom work, fitting clothes onto different body types and learning how to do that well, working with beautiful high-end fabrics, and figuring out how to engineer new garments all the time. Going through that process was really hard work but satisfying, I’m very lucky to have that experience, and that itself makes me a lot happier in Dallas. I love the team I work with, having a job where I feel appreciated and get to use my best skillset and be challenged constantly, that right there is the recipe to my happiness.

As much as I don’t have the energy to work on my own line sometimes, having a community and working with people whom you can figure things out together was the happiest I’ve ever been. We get along really well, laughing the whole day while doing some really hard work, that's beautiful, and the fact Dallas can have that pocket of people for me was enough for me. I don’t need an entire city full of people trying to be successful all the time, I want to have diversity in all kinds of ways and I think it’s beautiful I got to have in Dallas.

As I look around I can see a lot of your taste in a tangible form! Now the hard part is, what would you say is your most prized possession?

To start with, I pulled these sets out because these are one of my prized possessions. My dad gave me this tea cup from Ukraine, which was Katherine the Great’s favorite china pattern. This was a very unexpected gift, my dad picked it up for Christmas and I used it a lot even when I wasn’t so into tea back then. My best friend Ida got me this other one for my birthday one year. This one is a little bit vintage from the USSR as you can see.I have four of these now and they are all from different eras, the latest one my dad gave me is from the store and Ida found three more for me that are vintage.

I lived in Eastern Europe during high school so growing up in that environment when it used to be the USSR, living in a part of the world that had such a complex history can be dark but maybe I’m just naturally drawn to things that are complicated or troubling. Within the complexity, there’s never really one note for me, and growing up in Ukraine probably had a permanent impact on my need to constantly wrestle with complex things. So these tea sets mark as a reminder of how things can always be changing in places and in history.

This is a new addition. This is a baby shark my intern Rafael gave to me. I decided to decorate my house with fish, and I saw this huge taxidermy fish in a restaurant and thought how cool would that be I have one of those in this onclave. I don’t have a taxidermy fish but I do have a puffer fish another friend gave me above this arch. Rafael asked me if I wanted a baby shark and I said YES I DO!

A lot of the artwork I have is these prints from my friend Don Rock and his partner LeAnn, who helped with a lot of my early collection in Austin. They are closer to my parent’s age so they are important to me as someone who had a rich creative life and done a lot of interesting projects before.

I had a list of things I wanted in my apartment knowing it would make it a homey environment for me. I wanted big windows with great natural light and able to see the greenery through them. I wanted to be in an older building that is historical and not super modern, I love the arch here especially. I like filling this place with things that bring me a sense of delight like my plants, and my kitchen – I love cooking for people and myself.

I made these from my glass blowing works and here are the rest of my tea cups. This is another one of my prized possessions, it’s a tea glass holder and has Sputnik on it. I believe this was a relic during the soviet space age.

I love my bathroom and my bathtub. The shower curtains are really important to me providing the color combined with the lighting creates a perfect atmosphere.

And of course, we have the fish. I am really inspired by fish and I’ve been having recurring dreams about fish my whole life. In the dream I’m always above the water and observing fish from there, it’s always scary like a huge pool or murky water with huge fish in it. They scare me but also fascinate me.

I have a lot of pattern-making books, I love books. I have a huge collection of horror books, my friend Nathan sends me Halloween books every year. Murakami books are some of my favorites. This specific book is also a prized possession, it is an old astronomy book, I love the design of it and it’s got some old photographs of stars and a map of the moon, I think I’ve used some of these images as inspiration as part of my design a few years back too.

And we are almost at the bottom of my list of Qs for today, for those who are interested in getting into this business or starting something of their own. What suggestions or advice you would like to give them or wish you had known sooner?

What I would say is I wish I’d gotten into a trade school to learn technical skills. I did my best to learn on my own going to the closest things I could find at the time to learn fundamental pattern-making skills. There are many great schools like El Centro actually had a great program where a lot of my interns and people I worked with went to. Learning how to sew garments, pattern making, and potentially learning programs that we use now. I didn’t know how to use CLO 3D until last year.

So to your question, I would say start off learning hardcore technical skills and I think I was too optimistic going into designing when I was younger. It can be a hard industry to make a living in, so try and find a job that is as close and relevant to what you want to do. Always, always build your technical skills because once you know them, it’s permanent knowledge and it does make you more valuable and better at what you want to achieve, which can help make you feel more fulfilled and satisfied.