Lifestyle
Swan Gossip, Small Talk Studio, and the Slow Growth of Hand-Painted Clothes
One night in December 2019, Emma Louthan realized in a mild panic that she needed a gift for a child’s birthday party the next day. She grabbed acrylic paint and some of her daughter’s old clothes and began creating an aquatic scene: pink koi swimming beneath white and green water lilies.
The birthday boy wasn’t much impressed by the artful present, but it planted a seed in Ms. Louthan’s mind.
A few months later, she tried her hand at a collection of about a dozen hand-painted adult sweatshirts and found a more appreciative audience. It was the beginning of Covid lockdowns, and Ms. Louthan, an artist in Philadelphia who graduated from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, was working as a freelance textile designer while at home with her husband and 1-year-old daughter.
The sweatshirts, which she had painted in the kitchen of her brick duplex in Germantown, sold out online almost immediately.
“I feel like I just kind of accidentally hit it at the right time,” said Ms. Louthan, 35. Though divisive and terrifying, the pandemic also brought out people’s softer sides. Suddenly, comfort was king. Everyone was baking or crafting. Small-batch ceramics and upcycled quilted coats soared in popularity. There was a compulsory return to the home — and a wholehearted embrace of the homemade.
Noticing that people were drawn to “anything that could replicate a tie-dye look,” Ms. Louthan learned different dyeing techniques: botanical, ice, brush-applied. She traded her stiff acrylic paints for fabric versions, which she used to produce more sweatshirts and loungewear under her brand, Swan Gossip Shop.
As life slowed down during the pandemic, many other artists and independent designers also found success in the niche world of clothes with hand-drawn motifs — a trend spurred in part by Emily Adams Bode Aujla, who repopularized the senior cord tradition, which dates back to the 1900s, with her namesake brand.
Located across the country, these makers use a variety of methods, mediums and styles. In Los Angeles, Juliet Johnstone paints oversize, sherbet-colored flowers, butterflies and peace signs onto T-shirts and fitted work pants; in St. Louis, Lauren dela Roche and Curtis Campanelli of 69 Tearz use 19th-century farmer feed sacks as canvases for gothic hand lettering and rubber-hose-style cartoon characters; and in New York, Nick Williams and Phil Ayers of Small Talk Studio juxtapose imagery like American brand logos and botanical drawings on Japanese cotton.
In an era of mass-produced fast-fashion, these designers and others say they have experienced a growing demand for their meticulously rendered, one-of-a-kind garments.
Today, Ms. Louthan has a monthslong wait-list for her custom hand-painted clothes, which range in price from $250 (for T-shirts and sweatshirts) to $800 (for some pants). She’s partnered with local boutiques; the streetwear brand, Teddy Fresh; and national retailers including Anthropologie, Urban Outfitters and Free People on small batches of shirts, socks, bags and dresses.
“People say they can sense a certain energy in the hand-painted stuff,” Ms. Louthan said one afternoon this summer, while carefully adding green to a tendril on a pair of bluejeans.
Although her brand now has national reach, Ms. Louthan still paints her clothing at home, mostly on her kitchen table. Her process usually takes multiple days and consists of three stages: outlining forms, painting them and then heat-setting everything with an iron.
“I feel like with the rise of A.I., people are swinging the other way pretty intensely,” she said. “I think when everything feels so impersonal, people do gravitate toward art.”
Ms. Louthan’s work is fantastical, depicting off-kilter, edenic scenes of cherubs, rabbits, butterflies, devils, swans, moons and streams. She creates storybook worlds, where the sun smiles and jesters run wild.
She draws inspiration from illustrators of vintage children’s books (like Beatrix Potter and Roald Dahl); the Impressionist artist Mary Cassatt (known for her reverent paintings of domestic life); and ancient art.
Her daily walks to Awbury Arboretum, half a mile from her house, are also creative fodder. “There’s no roadblock,” she said, between what she sees blooming there and what she paints.
Before she had her first daughter, Rosie, in 2018, Ms. Louthan designed prints for mass market brands. Back then, she also painted by hand, but her designs would later be scanned, photoshopped and printed onto fabrics that would then be sold to companies like Gap, Old Navy and Alfred Dunner.
Ms. Louthan said her work today is “kind of the exact opposite of trying to design for thousands of people who want the same thing.”
Though Ms. Louthan occasionally orders plain white shirts or finds light-colored clothes in thrift stores, customers more frequently provide their own garments for her to paint (they have ranged from $800 Acne jeans to favorite old tees). It’s a way of giving clothes a second life, Ms. Louthan said, and making precious garments even more special.
The popularity of hand-drawn designs like hers can pose challenges. Producing a single garment is time consuming for artists and can also be physically taxing.
Ms. dela Roche of 69 Tearz used to joke that she was a “doodle machine.” But now, because of arthritis and bone spurs in her hand, she said, “I literally can’t hand-draw anything anymore.”
Last year, she and Mr. Campanelli, her business partner, began screen-printing outlines of her designs onto garments. Only about 25 items are screen-printed before Ms. dela Roche, 42, switches up the imagery. Mr. Campanelli, 33, still hand sews each garment and hand-paints certain portions, ensuring that each piece is distinct.
“Even if I try my absolute best, I cannot do the same thing twice,” he said.
In 2023, Mr. Williams and Mr. Ayers, the Small Talk Studio designers, expanded their then-three-year-old business to include seasonal, ready-to-wear collections.
“We had all these ideas we wanted to put into motion and we wanted the operation to support more than just these specific hand-drawn garments,” said Mr. Williams, 33. “The other part of it was also that there’s a ceiling to how much you can charge and how much you can put out if that’s all you’re doing.”
Of the current interest in such pieces, Mr. Ayers, 34, added, “We don’t know whether this is like a trend or not — you know, that people are into hand-drawn clothing.”
Ms. Louthan has had to make some adjustments, too. When she works with brands like Anthropologie and Free People, she is often tasked with fulfilling bulk orders of the same garment — 60 pairs of natural-dyed socks, for example, or 40 T-shirts emblazoned with kittens.
“They know that it won’t be all the same, but it’s as similar as possible,” she said. “I just work in batches, you know, kind of assembly-line style.”
Recently, Ms. Louthan has re-embraced the idea of licensing artwork to be scanned and printed on clothes. “I kind of hope to shift more into that in the future,” she said. “Honestly, just because hand-painting everything is physically — it’s just a lot.”
She’s striving to find a balance.
“There’s always at least one moment of, I would say, growth in every single thing I paint,” she said, pointing to a small area on a T-shirt where the red paint of a tomato bled into the blue paint of a stream. “I always make sure to have a few moments where I tell myself, even if no one else notices or no one else appreciates, I just think it’s really cool.”
Lifestyle
In ‘No Other Choice,’ a loyal worker gets the ax — and starts chopping
Lee Byung-hun stars in No Other Choice.
NEON
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In an old Kids in the Hall comedy sketch called “Crazy Love,” two bros throatily proclaim their “love of all women” and declare their incredulity that anyone could possibly take issue with it:
Bro 1: It is in our very makeup; we cannot change who we are!
Bro 2: No! To change would mean … (beat) … to make an effort.
I thought about that particular exchange a lot, watching Park Chan-wook’s latest movie, a niftily nasty piece of work called No Other Choice. The film isn’t about the toxic lecherousness of boy-men, the way that KITH sketch is. But it is very much about men, and that last bit: the annoyed astonishment of learning that you’re expected to change something about yourself that you consider essential, and the extreme lengths you’ll go to avoid doing that hard work.
Many critics have noted No Other Choice‘s satirical, up-the-minute universality, given that it involves a faceless company screwing over a hardworking, loyal employee. As the film opens, Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) has been working at a paper factory for 25 years; he’s got the perfect job, the perfect house, the perfect family — you see where this is going, right? (If you don’t, even after the end of the first scene, when Man-su calls his family over for a group hug while sighing, “I’ve got it all,” then I envy your blithe disinterest in how movies work. Never change, you beautiful blissful Pollyanna, you.)
He gets canned, and can’t seem to find another job in his beloved paper industry, despite going on a series of dehumanizing interviews. His resourceful wife Miri (Son Ye-jin) proves a hell of a lot more adaptable than he does, making practical changes to the family’s expenses to weather Man-su’s situation. But when foreclosure threatens, he resolves to eliminate the other candidates (Lee Sung-min, Cha Seung-won) for the job he wants at another paper factory — and, while he’s at it, maybe even the jerk (Park Hee-soon) to whom he’d be reporting.
So yes, No Other Choice is a scathing spoof of corporate culture. But the director’s true satirical eye is trained on the interpersonal — specifically the intractability of the male ego.
Again and again, the women in the film (both Son Ye-jin as Miri and the hilarious Yeom Hye-ran, who plays the wife of one of Man-su’s potential victims) entreat their husbands to think about doing something, anything else with their lives. But these men have come to equate their years of service with a pot-committed core identity as men and breadwinners; they cling to their old lives and seek only to claw their way back into them. Man-su, for example, unthinkingly channels the energy that he could devote to personal and professional growth into planning and executing a series of ludicrously sloppy murders.
It’s all satisfyingly pulpy stuff, loaded with showy, cinematic homages to old-school suspense cinematography and editing — cross-fades, reverse-angles and jump cuts that are deliberately and unapologetically Hitchcockian. That deliberateness turns out to be reassuring and crowd-pleasing; if you’re tired of tidy visual austerity, of films that look like TV, the lushness on display here will have you leaning back in your seat thinking, “This right here is cinema, goddammit.”
Narratively, the film is loaded with winking jokes and callbacks that reward repeat viewing. Count the number of times that various characters attempt to dodge personal responsibility by sprinkling the movie’s title into their dialogue. Wonder why one character invokes the peculiar image of a madwoman screaming in the woods and then, only a few scenes later, finds herself chasing someone through the woods, screaming. Marvel at Man-su’s family home, a beautifully ugly blend of traditional French-style architecture with lumpy Brutalist touches like exposed concrete balconies jutting out from every wall.
There’s a lot that’s charming about No Other Choice, which might seem an odd thing to note about such a blistering anti-capitalist screed. But the director is careful to remind us at all turns where the responsibility truly lies; say what you will about systemic economic pressure, the blood stays resolutely on Man-su’s hands (and face, and shirt, and pants, and shoes). The film repeatedly offers him the ability to opt out of the system, to abandon his resolve that he must return to the life he once knew, exactly as he knew it.
Man-su could do that, but he won’t, because to change would mean to make an effort — and ultimately men would rather embark upon a bloody murder spree than go to therapy.
Lifestyle
Austin airport to nearly double in size over next decade
AUSTIN, Texas – Austin-Bergstrom International Airport will nearly double in size over the next decade.
The airport currently has 34 gates. With the expansion projects, it will increase by another 32 gates.
What they’re saying:
Southwest, Delta, United, American, Alaska, FedEx, and UPS have signed 10-year use-and lease agreements, which outline how they operate at the airport, including with the expansion.
“This provides the financial foundation that will support our day-to-day operations and help us fund the expansion program that will reshape how millions of travelers experience AUS for decades to come,” Ghizlane Badawi, CEO of Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, said.
Concourse B, which is in the design phase, will have 26 gates, estimated to open in the 2030s. Southwest Airlines will be the main tenant with 18 gates, United Airlines will have five gates, and three gates will be for common use. There will be a tunnel that connects to Concourse B.
“If you give us the gates, we will bring the planes,” Adam Decaire, senior VP of Network Planning & Network Operations Control at Southwest Airlines said.
“As part of growing the airport, you see that it’s not just us that’s bragging about the success we’re having. It’s the airlines that want to use this airport, and they see advantage in their business model of being part of this airport, and that’s why they’re growing the number of gates they’re using,” Mayor Kirk Watson said.
Dig deeper:
The airport will also redevelop the existing Barbara Jordan Terminal, including the ticket counters, security checkpoints, and baggage claim. Concourse A will be home to Delta Air Lines with 15 gates. American Airlines will have nine gates, and Alaska Airlines will have one gate. There will be eight common-use gates.
“Delta is making a long-term investment in Austin-Bergstrom that will transform travel for years to come,” Holden Shannon, senior VP for Corporate Real Estate at Delta Air Lines said.
The airport will also build Concourse M — six additional gates to increase capacity as early as 2027. There will be a shuttle between that and the Barbara Jordan Terminal. Concourse M will help with capacity during phases of construction.
There will also be a new Arrivals and Departures Hall, with more concessions and amenities. They’re also working to bring rideshare pickup closer to the terminal.
City officials say these projects will bring more jobs.
The expansion is estimated to cost $5 billion — none of which comes from taxpayer dollars. This comes from airport revenue, possible proceeds, and FAA grants.
“We’re seeing airlines really step up to ensure they are sharing in the infrastructure costs at no cost to Austin taxpayers, and so we’re very excited about that as well,” Council Member Vanessa Fuentes (District 2) said.
The Source: Information from interviews conducted by FOX 7 Austin’s Angela Shen
Lifestyle
After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’
Wyle, who spent 11 seasons on ER, returns to the hospital in The Pitt. Now in Season 2, the HBO series has earned praise for its depiction of the medical field. Originally broadcast April 21, 2025.
Hear The Original Interview
Television
After years of avoiding the ER, Noah Wyle feels ‘right at home’ in ‘The Pitt’
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