Rust Belt Vendor Designs 'Real Clothing For Real Women'

The Rust Belt Market in Ferndale offers a unique experience for patrons as well as vendors. Each week, Patch will feature one artist to get a closer look at what they do.

Liesl Geneva

This week, meet clothing designer Liesl Geneva of Apparel Artistry. She travels 2 1/2 hours from Grand Rapids one weekend per month to vend at the Rust Belt Market.

"Liesl is something else," says Rust Belt co-owner Chris Best. "Not only is she a fashion innovator but she is a riot to be around. Her styles are so damn cool."

Best says Geneva's designs are made to fit women of all sizes - "Anyone can enjoy her edgy style," he said.

Geneva is also approachable. "Some fashion designers can put on a pretentious attitude and be off-putting to talk to. Not Liesl," he says. "Come by this weekend and say hi to her before she hits the big time and we only see her on TV and magazines."

Here's what Geneva had to say in a recent chat with Patch:

What do you do?

"I like to say I make real clothing for real women, even the skinny ones. The whole basis of my business is making clothes that any woman can wear. And by that I mean if you see a specific dress, it will fit you," Geneva says.

Every piece Geneva designs can generally fit anyone from a size 0 to size 20. "Each piece adjusts to fit your body," she said. "It's basically free-sized but in a way that still compliments and honors your body shape."

How did you get your start?

"I just kind of stumbled across this idea of making clothes that would adjust to fit," Geneva says.

She sold screen print designs at festivals for five years and spent time working in California before she started designing free-size clothing three years ago. She came up with the idea after she took a shirt initially intended for a screen print run and "tore it to pieces," she says.

"I ended up deciding to paint on it with some stuff that I had laying around. I'm not a painter, I'm not an artist in that sense," she said. "Over the course of two weeks I ended up painting this image that really surprised me. It was something really beautiful that I didn't realize that I was capable of."

She received many compliments on the piece and decided to use ribbons, jewelry chains and other items to make it adjustable - so "whoever loves it can wear it."

What inspires you?

"Everything," Geneva says. "I'm inspired by people. Every piece that I make has a story behind it because it was inspired by one person or another."

Each style has its own name - a new "Rena" vest inspired by and named after her friend, for example. "That's how I get most of my ideas is just talking to different women and just meeting them and being inspired by it. Their stories, their lives and their challenges," she said.

Geneva also uses her work to help overcome challenges she has experienced in her own life - tapping into her own creativity to keep herself going. "Whenever I start to slip back a little bit I will just throw myself into a new project and dig myself back out that way," she said. "Bringing my own light to the darkness. I try to be my own torch."

What is it about the Rust Belt that attracted you to it?

"The Rust Belt is my favorite place to vend. It's just a really good family," Geneva says. "It's a group of artists that really care about each other and feed off of each other. It's just this beautiful creative community. And Chris and Tiffany [Best] are awesome people."

Geneva may not have found out about the Rust Belt - and might not even be living in Michigan anymore - if it wasn't for a former co-worker at a truck-stop diner she was working at while saving up for a move to Austin. The dishwasher picked up a newspaper that a truck driver had left at a table and it featured an article about the Rust Belt.

"He brought it to me all excited," she recalls. "He was like, "Look at this, look at what they're opening out by Detroit. You should go there.'"

So she made a trip to Ferndale shortly after the market opened. "I came out here and was immediately blown away by the sense of community and the creativity and the sense of welcome that I got," Geneva says. "I kind of felt like I had found my creative home."

Tell us one thing about you that would surprise us.

"I'm not gay," Geneva laughs. "I am a blue-mohawked artist who doesn't wear a lot of makeup and swaggers around a lot. And most people that I meet immediately assume that I exclusively date women, which is amusing to me because while I do date women I also have a wonderful loving boyfriend at home. That seems to come as a shock to people."

You can check out Geneva's work from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday at the Rust Belt Market. For more information, visit her web site.