Janelle Abbott had a choice to make. The Seattle-based designer behind fashion label JRAT was styling the last of her looks on the eve of her solo New York Fashion Week debut, and one garment, a cornflower blue ruffled gown, just wasn’t working for her. But her models, a troupe of dancers and artists of all shapes and sizes, loved the look. Other designers might have been precious about their vision, but Abbott sent it down the runway as it was. At the end of the day, she says, the clothes are meant to be worn.

“I feel like a Montessori of a brand,” Abbott says. “Everyone’s welcome. Wear it how you want. Sure, you’re wearing it backward, but I think it could work.”

The Kenmore-born child of parents who owned a small clothing company using Tencel, a fiber made from wood pulp, Abbott creates her own collections out of reclaimed fabrics and zero-waste patterns. Drawing from a trove of upcycled materials, Abbott sews, shreds, cuts, weaves, and paints ebullient, densely patterned garments, all by hand.

“Maximalism is a sustainability imperative,” Abbott says. “Because so much material exists in the world, if I can use more material in one garment then I’m salvaging that much more from ending up in landfills or being crated and shipped to a developing nation that doesn’t want to deal with our garbage.”

Abbott has always eschewed the big business of fast-fashion and trend cycles. Instead, she has sold her one-of-a-kind pieces in boutiques, mounted performance art, and presented garments in art galleries. Abbott’s collections combine Seattle’s DIY, eco-friendly attitudes with the avant-garde handmade sensibilities of downtown New York. Her style references are playful and vast, drawing from Clueless as much as Frasier, with a healthy sprinkling of The Big Comfy Couch on top.

In her typical rip-it-up-and-start-again style, Homesick, which debuted at Fashion Week in September 2024, began with the remaining materials from a previous collection shown as a dance piece at Bumbershoot 2023. Homesick is a riff on memories of hazy days home from school, drifting in and out of sleep while watching daytime television. The clothes have the complex, bitter sweetness of a honey lozenge and the bubbling exuberance of a contestant on The Price Is Right. Ruffled and elastic-banded silhouettes create puffy, pillowy shapes designed to suit all body types. Raw hems, open weaves, and layered separates dominate, with a cascade of vintage beads and buttons topping things off.

For Abbott, there is creative potential in nostalgia, whether it’s for childhood sick days or the histories that her clothes carry.

“Every time you recall a memory, your brain is shredding and refabricating it and then storing it in a new form,” she says. “This collection is a shredding of all those different ideas and how they accumulate to create a form that’s referential of something previous, but it’s always slightly different and slightly changed.”