Frankie Slaughter wears art.

After eight years in Hong Kong, Frankie boxed up her collection of vintage Asian textiles, moved home to Richmond, and focused on renovating her family’s home.

“For a year, I shut off the whole creative thing,” she says. “We gutted the house; started the girls in school.” 

When she finally opened the boxes, the rich fabrics from Thailand, India, Bali, and Vietnam revived a sensibility she thought she’d abandoned. “We don’t see that adornment here; the hand-embroidery, the textures, the beading and trim. Everything that was Asian had to be in my work.  It had become who I was.”  

She experimented with jackets, commissioning samples from local seamstresses and embellishing them with appliqués, tassels, and textiles from her collection.  “I might use a Balinese altar cloth in one; an Indian door hanging in another—no two are alike.”  A Frankie Slaughter label is on the drawing board, but the jackets will remain one-of-a-kind works of art. Catch Frankie’s work at Quirk Gallery’s Masterquirks exhibition and sale, October 4-6.