Keelan & Kiki Mode

 

Kikimode.com

 

My precious Keelan is at the perfect time of her life, at age 25 she has the world at her fingertips. She is a  maladroit millennial in a world full of war, poverty, greed and yet full of love, hope and humanity. I may sound cliché, but I am indeed a proud mother. Why? I gave birth to a beautifully amazing daughter – intelligent, precocious, challenging and brilliant.

Keelan has been struggling with Lupus Nephritis since age 15 which in itself, is a challenge. (refer to “The Many Masks of Lupus” for past post about Keelan and Lupus) Living with Lupus is painful with most days very difficult to even get out of bed. Recently, an all vegetable diet, no sugar and exercise has made the Lupus more tolerable to live with. Doctors had prescribed steroids and various medications in the past to help mask the pain and symptoms but none of these options can cure or eleviate the condition. Keelan had to also deal with taking care of her ailing grandfather who was suffering from Parkinson's for the past four years and recently passed away a month ago.

In spite of Keelan’s health challenges and taking care of her bedridden grandfather, she has managed to create and design her very own, very first fashion collection, taking her skills from the Fashion Institutes of North Hollywood and Portland, OR, to put her signature on the bohemian fashion craze. However, Keelan initially wanted to make outfits that she herself wanted to wear, fashions that she found difficult to find that were affordable to buy. From a moderately successful eBay fashion business for one year, Keelan decided to expand upon the vintage used clothing shop to designing a more contemporary clothing collection. Thus, Keelan created Kiki Mode – Fashions for the groovy state of mind.

Staying with her original love for vintage clothing, Keelan redesigns familiar styles of the 60’s and 70’s and puts a more current twist to those retro styles using some authentic vintage fabrics and notions, vintage reproduction fabrics and alternative, eco-friendly, organic materials such as hemp, bamboo, recycled vinyl and rubber, and old scraps discarded by other designers. Keelan is even recreating her own artistic designs to digitally print with water-based pigment inks and dyes that hold no chemicals, thus creating sustainable fabrics for her collections. The only cottons Keelan uses are organic cotton sateen, bamboo and organic cotton knit which are environmentally friendly and all made in the USA.

In all of my excitement, I offered Keelan financial capital and my expertise in business operations as my background in working at major department stores during my youth either as a buyer or manager certainly would give Keelan a boost.

Keelan better defined her fashion biz as a specialty, eco-friendly biz to give work to local seamstresses in the LA area. She is inspired by and revers such 60’s and 70's fashion icons as Biba and Mary Quant who operated specialty boutiques in London, along with Paraphernalia Boutiques in the US - for those one-of-a-kind fashion pieces. Keelan wanted to steer away from the mass production option, refusing to become a slave to the runway rules of the trade, basing her opinion from watching friends attempt that very direction with their own failed high fashion attempts.

I’m proud of Keelan’s sense of uncompromising fortitude and determination. I’m proud of her sense of selflessness. She may not become a millionaire in giving work to LA-based seamstresses and producing only one-of-a-kind fashions, but she believes that it sure beats the stress of dealing with mass production quotas.  One of Keelan’s newest challenges will possibly be the $15  per hour minimum wage to be implemented in the city of Los Angeles which will make it more difficult to make profit sooner. However, Keelan is determined not to ship her jobs out to China, India or any third world exploitative country sweatshops – this has no place in her world and moral sensibility. I’ve put all my eggs into this basket – my creative daughter. I’ve been representing artists since 1988, giving shows all over the world. And representing my daughter is by far the most rewarding and profitable, both financially and emotionally.