Retro Designer Featured at Peekskill Coffee House

PEEKSKILL -- Alana Felton never worries about seeing someone else at a party wearing the same dress she has on. She knows it will never happen.

Felton designs and sews her own retro-styled dresses based on 1940s and 1950s styles by hand for herself and others as a part-time job. Some of her best dresses are on display this month at the Peekskill Coffee House, where she has worked for the past six years.

“All the dress patterns are really just basic patterns and all the fabrics are one of a kind so I usually have between 30 and 60 fabrics to choose from at any given time,” Felton said. “They choose the fabric and they choose the dress. The thing is that there’s only enough fabric to make one dress so you’re going to get a dress no one else has.”

Sewing has been a passion for most of the 26-years-old’s life, she said.

“I’ve been sewing since I was a kid, making clothes for my dolls,” Felton said. “Then when I was in high school I decided I wanted to make grown-up clothes and my mom taught me how to use my grandma’s sewing machine. My first couple of dresses were disasters.”

Felton, who lived in Putnam Valley and attended Walter Panas High School after moving with her family from Iowa, started making the dresses while living alone in Louisville, KY after high school.

“I had no friends there and didn’t know anyone there so I got a sewing machine and I didn’t have anything to do except sew,” Felton said.

A self-professed “music nerd”, Felton said her love of retro styled clothing styles grew out of her love of music.

“When I was in high school I was really into punk rock and that’s when I started sewing so if you looked at my sewing it was all punk rock clothing,” Alana said. “And punk rock became psychobilly and psychobilly became rockabilly and I molded it to fit the music scene.”

While Felton started out with 1950s and 1940 styles, she said she recently has branched out into 1960s clothing as well. Felton sells her dresses online on her website, www.retroshreds.com, at area Rockabilly festivals and at the Coop store at 103 South Division St. where she works part-time.

Creating the custom dresses is a time consuming process, she said.

“Each dress takes 12 to 20 hours to make so I tell people three to five weeks just because I have a full-time job,” Felton said.

 

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