Sally LaPointe unveiled her spring/summer fashion line in New York featuring big boots, faux horsehair, and vinyl. “The spring line is inspired by the idea of going mad,’’ she said.
(Elizabeth Lippman for The Boston Globe)
Her sense of style is easy to see
Marblehead designer named one to watch
Sally LaPointe unveiled her spring/summer fashion line in New York featuring big boots, faux horsehair, and vinyl. “The spring line is inspired by the idea of going mad,’’ she said.
(Elizabeth Lippman for The Boston Globe)
NEW YORK — Light emanates from behind a metal industrial door as a low fog rolls across the floor of the Chelsea art gallery. The door opens, light pours out, and an otherworldly beauty in massive platform boots and an opalescent silk dress strolls out as if she’s disembarking from a spacecraft straight from Neptune.
It’s almost hard to believe that this is the singular vision of a woman from the very quaint burg of Marblehead. But Sally LaPointe’s debut runway show at New York Fashion Week was one of the most anticipated collections among followers of fresh talent here. New York magazine named LaPointe one of its nine designers to watch this fashion week, gushing that her “unfussy silhouettes makes her punchy materials all the more wearable.’’ The collection she showed here on Sunday for spring/summer 2011 was full of futuristic fashion, created from unique materials such as faux horsehair and vinyl. The shoes alone, which resembled Frankenstein boots decorated as elaborately as a wedding cake, would leave Lady Gaga chartreuse with envy. But there were also more demure offerings, such as silk tulip tops and pencil skirts.
“The spring line is inspired by the idea of going mad,’’ the 26-year-old LaPointe said before the show. “So it’s a mix of beauty, distortion, and aggression. I wanted to make something straightforward, but I wanted it to have a true beauty to it as well.’’
Back in the day, LaPointe was a Marblehead high school student who wore jeans and T-shirts to class and pretty much blended in with her surroundings. She now sports a dome of white-blond hair that has been precariously teased, pulled back, and sprayed into submission. Her last collection was inspired by medical syringes and aircraft, she says matter-of-factly.
“I think those ideas were something that were always there,’’ she says of her unusual sources of inspiration. “I think being from such a small town, you’re a little bit sheltered. Then when I left, it was kind of an explosion. Everything started to inspire me. I usually have lots of ideas that come from nowhere specific. It’s just things in my mind.’’
After high school, LaPointe attended the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2006. Shortly after, she moved to New York to start her business. Her line is currently carried in four stores (none in the Boston area), and although the company currently consists of just the designer and her business manager, LaPointe’s hoping to grow the business in the next few years, continuing to explore her unorthodox inspirations.
Being counted as one of the nine designers to watch this fashion week may help that plan come to fruition slightly faster.
“It’s funny, because after that came out, people started contacting us,’’ she says. “Before then it was always the other way around. It’s a nice position to be in for a change.’’
Christopher Muther can be reached at muther@globe.com. 
© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.
