Publication: Fashion Accessories Magazine
Date: October 1983
Section: Trade & Industry News
“There is romance in every part of life. You just have to look.” Carushka
“In a few minutes, you’re going to see a bunny go by. Just keep an eye on the windows,” said Carushka, Los Angeles-based designer of dance and bodywear.
“A bunny?” I questioned, my voice rising an octave on the second syllable.
“Mmmhm,” she said calmly. “An eight-foot bunny. Wait ’till you see — he’s gray with big pink ears.”
Where else but California would you find a young countess with slightly pink hair, in long handpainted sweatshirt and violet tights, who in four years has built a thriving dancewear/bodywear business. Four years ago, she had $3,000, a design for a unitard and a vision of something called “space sportswear.” Today, she owns and runs a 10 million-dollar operation. Given that sort of scenario, eight-foot rabbits are just part of the landscape.
She is talking about inspiration. What and where and how and why and when these ideas for space sportswear come from. “Romance. I’m definitely inspired by romance and its moods,” she says in a voice that reminds me of lace and gentle things.
“There is romance in every part of life. You just have to look.” But when Carushka talks about romance, she is talking about something far more all-encompassing than an occasional bouquet of flowers or pale blue stationery or lace on an anklet, she is talking about a way to live a life. It is a way that welcomes the improvisational in every moment and reacts spontaneously to that moment.
The room in her Hollywood home called the design room is very pink. Not the pink of those little marshmallow
Easter chicks, but pink like the color of lingerie in vintage clothing shops. There are three big pink bows on one wall with a tangle of white ribbon spritzing from the center of each. There is a silver magic wand with a glass rod near the bows. There is a pink clock and on the wall at the end of the room, three pink leotards hang prettily to the right of a white sewing machine. There is music playing, all pink bubbles of electronic sound by Van Gellis and Jean Michelle Garre. Music from another dimension, Rod Serling might call it. Seen through its sound, the commonplace — a pair of scissors with a blue handle, ten telephone messages, a schedule for the ballet with dates circled in dark pencil — seems remarkable.
Yet, the inhabitant of the pink world is equally at home in what she calls the….
6 Fashion Accessories Magazine, October 1982