Designing Building Fashion the Gail Chovan Way

By Jennifer Wang

She is a builder, and the world is her workshop.


When Gail Chovan said she wanted to be a forest ranger, it sounded like a non-sequitur.

I’m sitting across from a woman (metaphorically, through a screen) who has a tattoo in French, multiple master’s degrees, and a sewing studio in a 19th century farmhouse on the outskirts of Paris, France. A forest ranger? But then she explained: she’s always been one to climb trees, build sheds, and make something out of nature. Suddenly, it made complete sense.

“I consider myself a builder,” she said, as a correction when the word “designer” was brought up. For Chovan, that distinction matters — “designers” look at things to recreate them, she implied. Builders start from scratch. Fashion, she said, is no less rigorous than cooking. Just as chefs create dishes from a recipe, she starts her pieces with raw material and works forward, one decision at a time.

“Clothing, food, shelter are three things we as humans need — and somehow we reduce clothing to being almost trivial,” she said. “I think there is a recipe for it.”

Gail Chovan grew up in New Jersey in the sixties and seventies as a kid who didn’t believe that there were limitations . She drew cells and frogs by hand, briefly certain she’d become a medical illustrator. She picked French as her required foreign language, confident in her own abilities to master what others deemed as the hardest of the options.

“I really like the game of a language, just like I like the game of putting together clothing,” she said as she described how she fell in love with the language. “So always kind of a constructivist approach to things. I liked the way my brain worked when I was there.”

Her French classes eventually parlayed into her undergraduate studies, where she studied French literature in Paris. Between the language and the city, she started to consider fashion design as a career.


“I thought, ‘I can do this. I can teach myself to sew,’” she said. “I moved back from Paris and got a sewing machine and just started teaching myself.”


A few years later, she found herself back in Paris — this time for a degree in apparel design. She stayed for years, showed her own line, before returning to the United States to understand the business side of things.

In 2003, Gail Chovan opened her first and only boutique on South Congress in Austin, Texas: Blackmail. The defining feature of her shop was obvious to anyone who walked through its doors — everything in it was black. Chovan said she was greatly inspired by Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto. On the walls, there is a quote by the French poet Paul Valery: the dark is not so dark.

The quote also lives on the skin of Gail’s forearms in both English and French as tattoos. She had put up the quote long before her daughter was born blind and autistic, but afterward, the quote bore new weight.

“She’ll tell you she sees everything,” Chovan said. “The dark is not so dark.”

It was her daughter who inspired Gail to pursue her most recent degree: a master’s in museum studies at Harvard, with a thesis on multisensory approaches to fashion exhibitions. She wanted to understand what makes art tangible.

One of her proudest installations explores this very issue. No Trace of Now Will Remain is mounted at Women & Their Work, an Austin art gallery that had never exhibited fashion before Chovan’s installation. The exhibit is unlike anything in the traditional fashion world: with humanoid arms sprawled out from under ballgowns and tufts of human hair hanging from bodices. In the making of this installation, Gail not only bought garments, but also painted chairs white, took locks of her son’s hair, and even buried a straitjacket in the mud of her front yard.

“The name of ‘No Trace of Now Will Remain’ is kind of ironic because of course, it’s material culture,” she said, laughing.“It is continuing, it is remaining. Maybe the present doesn’t remain, but the object can remain.”

Chovan started teaching fashion history and design at UT Austin in 2015. She shut down Blackmail after 21 years, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Between being a mother, a shopkeeper, a designer, and a professor, there was too much on her plate. But she doesn’t frame closing Blackmail as a loss — she saw herself breaking free from the constraints of seasonal fashion.

“I needed to take a break,” she said. “And I decided I would only make work when I was ready to express myself. Not on a calendar.”

Her next show is already mapped out: a collection launching in October 2027, built entirely from only two pattern pieces. Every garment in the collection (approximately 20 variations) will be sewn from the same shapes, folded or altered or embellished differently, in different fabrics, at different lengths. The garment will shift with whoever’s wearing it, yet it’ll be cut from the same two patterns.


“We are all more the same than different,” she said, nodding as she considered her artistic message. “It’s a trick.”

This summer, Chovan will spend three months in France, preparing to launch another new project: a two-week fashion residency at her home outside Paris, a 19th-century house where she has converted the attic into a sewing workshop. Seven students will travel with her, make work, and stage a show in the village at the end.

When she returns , she wants to drop a studio pod in the backyard. Her husband, who is a neon sign builder, will probably build it. ("We both make patterns," she said, explaining how they understand each other. "We figured that out very early on.")

She has no regrets. Not about closing the shop nor her many degrees, which she jokes she'll combine one day in a cocktail shaker and pour out as a doctorate. Not about the decades-long detour through language and literature before she ever picked up a needle. If anything, the winding path seems integral to how she views the world. She is still, after all this time, building.

"Keep creating," she says, when asked what she'd tell her younger self. Then, with a smile tugging at the corners of her lips: "And never give up on fighting the patriarchy."  ■