Editor’s Note: Khadijah McCaskill is one of my greatest students over the last decade. She was such an advanced writer that she was the Head Editor of the School Newspaper at View Park Accelerated Charter High School as a high school sophomore. I taught her at View Park in her 11th and 12th grade years in Journalism and Creative Writing. After finishing her Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology at Bryn Mawr, she is now an educator, craftswoman and arts advocate in Washington DC. She writes on the line below about Cozy Femme, her crochet clothing business. — Mike Sonksen
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Cozy Femme is a crochet clothing business and craft revival community. The goal of Cozy Femme is to bring the utility and therapeutic aspects of crafting to communities where it has been considered a lost or non-functional art form. Cozy Femme is the brainchild of Khadijah McCaskill, a 20-something artist and teacher, an LA native living in Washington DC.
Clothing is a basic need. The human connection to the creation, distribution, and wearing of clothes is slowly eroding due to certain trends within fast fashion that call for cheap materials, one-size-fits-all approaches, and impersonal business practices.
Cozy Femme empowers consumers with custom clothing options and revives a lost art form by educating and employing women of color, queer women, and women from different generations to literally own their own fashion statements.
We create innovative, on-trend crochet fashions with the influence and inspiration of current fashions mixed with textile traditions from around the world.
I’m always motivated to make something that really fits the person, not just physically but aesthetically as well. I think in the world of mass production and mass consumption of clothing and fashion trends, the art of tailoring and customizing has been lost.
I’m from LA, and people from LA are all about finding the most unique, custom piece. I’m motivated by the fact that I’m reviving that a little bit by letting people go as out-there as they want with their ideas and bringing that to life.
The idea behind Cozy Femme is a little Tinker Belle in space, and a little bit of the West African concept of artistry coming through all aspects of life. There is never art for art’s sake, the practical is the artistic.
Cozy Femme and Khadijah McCaskill will be in Los Angeles conducting a workshop at Kaleidoscope Kollective in Echo Park on Tuesday, August 22nd from 6 to 8PM. 1511 W. Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, California 90026
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