SOBOTKA
Among the fluff of blonde spiral curls, a thick mini-braid hangs beside Megan Marie Dodge’s cheek. The 23-year old designer of New York-based line Sobotka sits in a ball on a big navy couch. A putty-colored, fringed leather pouch hangs from her neck. She wears it constantly and hides her trinkets inside.
The Los Angeles native seems to personify the tagline of the label she started in 2010 at Parsons, which reads: There is a priestess and a warrior inside every woman.
Dodge named Sobtoka after her great-grandmother, a strong woman of gypsy blood who lived near the river between Washington and Oregon until the age of one hundred and one. The kids would pick blueberries there, place pennies on train tracks, and run free. After she fell in love with Francesca Lia Block’s young-adult novel Weetzie Bat as a teenager, Dodge decided she wanted to become a designer and soon began thrifting, cutting, and sewing. Despite the occasional junior-high bully, she wore ridiculous things she had found and created, pink cowboy boots included.
Dodge has a very particular aesthetic, but articulate it, she will not. She instead defines it by redefining through her designs each season. She showed her third collection, the line’s first New York Fashion Week presentation, in September at the Jane Hotel in the West Village. While the previous collection was inspired by 2012 doomsday prophecies, the writings of Daniel Pinchbeck and the “collective unconscious” of the world, Spring 2012 hones in on that feeling in the United States specifically.
The thoughtful collection carries an air of whimsy and strength, from flowy chiffon in a dreamy, psychedelic print of purple, red, and blue to a silky green plaid—all paired with clunky, creamsicle-colored Dr. Martens. The models wore frizzed hair and tribal face paint, evoking, in all, a sort of modern feminine shaman.
Beyond the breezy dresses, sporty cropped pants, and architectural jackets, Dodge also designed each of the four prints used throughout the collection. She created one from a screenshot of iodine radiation across the United States overlaid with the reflection of an oil spill. “It’s sort of that silly notion of seeing the beautiful in the terrible,” she says.
Though the previous collection, composed entirely of hand-sewn, one-of-kind pieces, was sold at downtown New York shops Black Tag and End of Century, Dodge hopes to produce on a larger scale soon. She says that being young in New York, around so much design, “It’s easy to be swayed and to start looking at things the way other people look at them.” But she’s determined to follow her own path. “If I’m going to have my own line, it should be exactly who I am,” she says. “This is my artwork, this is who I am.”
For more information, please visit Sbtka.com.
