LC Meridian

Issue date: 9/1/08 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Production presses on into the final hours before Fashion Week.

After relocating from France in 1997 to Queens, New York and creating textile patterns in the apartment she shares with her husband, Astrid De Saint Anthost found a practical space for her hand-painted textile and home design studio. It is called Le Studio Anthost.

De Saint Anthost, 35, bypassed the glitzy fashion world of Manhattan. She shirked being alongside sleek boutiques and opted instead for a humble neighborhood in Astoria, Queens. Surrounded by intricately decorated two and three story houses with neatly maintained gardens, the scenery is one that would make the Brady Bunch proud.

From the outside, Le Studio Anthost, established in 2000, looks like a charming, diminutive mom and pop store. There is no superfluous storefront or a bold street sign to navigate the journey. Instead, the front door of Le Studio Anthost is wide open on a warm summer day in August. The rigid sunlight shines upon Elizabeth Polish, De Saint Anthost's business partner in lighting design, and De Saint Anthost's three female apprentices, who have taken a break to eat their lunch.

De Saint Anthost can be heard speaking French with her 26-year-old trainee Natasha Stojanovic. But despite De Saint Anthost's growing success, she enjoys "la vie simple," as the French would say. She sits at an office table, which doubles as a dining area, surrounded by a barrage of paperwork and her Mac laptop. With textile requests heaping at the top of her to-do list, De Saint Anthost and her team prepare for New York Fashion Week. A host of fashion designers will be unveiling their collections from September 5 to September 12 in Manhattan's Bryant Park, and many are former clients of De Saint Anthost.

Her posh resume includes textile design for most of the kingpins of the catwalk including John Galliano at Dior, Vera Wang, Jean Paul Gautier, Bill Blass and Oscar De La Renta. But it's not what you might think: there's no Devil Wears Prada moment in sight.

It is lunchtime. De Saint Anthost is dressed in a black tank top splattered with paint of every color of the rainbow, khaki shorts and pink flip-flops.

"I'm not really into fashion," she said. "I see it as an art."

De Saint Anthost, who studied at Atelier de Sevres in Paris, said that she's always viewed her work as a craft that needs patience to be perfected. It's a concept that she said not many aspiring textile designers have fully grasped in the U.S. because there is more of an emphasis on making a profit than there is on the art form itself. De Saint Anthost set out to make her studio a place for exploration.

Dried paint is splattered on the floor and bottles of paint are stocked on a few white shelves in the back of the studio like a paint-can display at Home Depot. Stencils, markers, pattern paper, muslin, scissors, paint-brushes, glue and other art supplies border the studio, while stacks of paint-stained Q-tips are scattered on the tables as if a mad scientists had used the studio as a test center.

"It's very much like a lab," said 26-year-old trainee Raquel Sosa, a Parsons School of Design Graduate. Sosa, resides in Queens, but is originally from the Bronx. She is going to be studying at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London this fall, and has been interning at Le Studio Anthost for three months. "Astrid is big on experimenting and seeing what happens, especially with things that happen by accident," she said. "She's exceedingly flexible, very passionate about her work and open to ideas as they come."

All of De Saint Anthost's designs are painted by hand rather than with machinery, which ensures that the client is getting a one-of-a-kind creation. From splattering and tie-dye to Shibori and Lacquer, Anthost has experimented with a horde of textile techniques.

Among the clientele of De Saint Anthost's focus this fall is Victoria Secret, which is preparing for its annual fashion show scheduled to air on CBS in December. A collection of 30 sketches with colorful floral designs line a bulletin board in the corner of the studio, and De Saint Anthost and her team said that their job is to make the company's design visions a reality. But the most intricate and time-consuming print of the day was a tulle fabric with a glitter design that replicated the cracks in a pavement. The design is for Isaac Mizrahi's spring '09 collection; Mizrahi recently concluded his 5-year stint designing for Target this year in order to take the position as the creative director of the Liz Claiborne Company.

"When we start, it's very exciting," said De Saint Anthost. "But after a few yards, it becomes repetitive." Although the work is often cyclical, she said that it's never boring, especially during New York Fashion Week. "When you have a 100 yard fabric, you encounter a lot of problems. Because of these problems, it is a new routine. It's a new job with new challenges."

De Saint Anthost said that she learned first-hand the reward of doing what she loves despite the challenges that artists face. With a paintbrush in her hand and her hair scattered around her face, she seems to have had everything figured out long ago.

"Painting doesn't make any money," she said. "So I found a way to make money painting."

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