MONICA JOHNSON

Everything is Fashion. Fashion is Everything.

Chris J. Magyar

Monica lives in her studio: an attic apartment at the top of some paint-flaked backyard stairs that look like they'll turn to ash at the first sign of fire. The people downstairs from her have a child-- evidence included a small pile of Cheerios in the lawn-- and lots of socks, or so it seemed from the num-ber dangling on the laundry line. The establishment seemed peaceful enough. The downstairs neighbors could only have one complaint ... Miss Monica's sewing machine shakes the entire house. It's an old sewing machine, blunt and noisy and formidable. Monica keeps it because, she said, "A nice new one would only ruin the Astroturf."

Monica makes clothes out of the strangest materials: shower curtains, coffee bags, Sweet & Low packets, packaging tape, and, yes, indoor/outdoor carpeting.

"I get ideas all the time. Whenever I see a material ... it's almost a sickness. I see the material, and I picture the dress," Monica said without shrugging or apologizing. She is what she is; she makes what she makes. Those in the know-- generally defined as those who have met Monica-- are begging for more.

"A lot of guys have asked me to start making men's clothes, because they want to be in a show wearing a Monica original," she said. Someday, she'll oblige the boys. For now, though, she's still experimenting with bikinis and A-line dresses, cobbling outfits together sometimes without ever measuring the model. At her recent fashion show at the Bug Theatre, she was short by three pieces, so she made three new ones in the space of an hour. She had no measurements on two of the models, but she had seen them before; the dresses fit perfectly. This talent-- which could be called freakish if it weren't for Monica's sweet confidence-- is blazing through the Front Range. Monica Johnson-- a.k.a. Monica Moonlight, a.k.a. Monica McSweetness, a.k.a. Agent 23 Lilly Spoon-- has a show April 13 at Rock Island, a show at July's big scooter rally, and a hand in costuming an upcoming dance performance. Not bad for someone with no formal training, no experience, and no need for fine stitching or a state-of-the-art sewing machine.

MONICA M^cSWEETNESS

Monica holds a party about once a month at her apartment. They always have a theme (generally in the '60s vein) and always involve at least a few new guests. "Eventually, everyone in Denver will have been to my apartment," she said.

Not a bad idea, as it's one of the more interesting apartments this city holds. Right from the start, you know something's different-- the main door leads through the bathroom, to the kitchen to the living room. "You've gotta love the bathroom entrance," she said. Yes, you've got to love an architect who puts the toilet right next to the front door. And you've got to love an occupant who covers that toilet with zebra fur. "Someday, when I get a bigger place, I'm going to turn my house into a pop culture museum," she said as she took me on the tour. In the kitchen stood the main selling point-- an ancient refrigerator with a small butter compartment built into the freezer portion, and a heavy door that could conceivably lock a small child inside. (I wonder if her downstairs neighbors know about this.) It's not so much a fridge as an icebox.

Her old TV/ VCR combo is covered in rhinestones. The nooks and crannies are decorated with Pokemon, Power Puff Girls, and Pee-Wee Herman. She has nearly a dozen brightly colored wigs on wig stands, and a shoe wall to make any full-blooded American woman turn green with envy. Monica's own art adorns the walls: a photograph of a toothbrush; a painting of two cherries. Immediately, you sense that Monica, as an artist, looks beyond the human form to examine the objects crafted for human use. The human figure itself is strangely absent in her apartment-- only cartoons and dolls and faceless wig-wearing heads-- especially since this is a fashion designer we're talking about. Or is it?

"I never come up with a statement," she said in regard to her designs. "Other people sometimes see meaning, so I guess my subconscious says things, but I don't start with a statement." Compare this to the typical French haute-couture designer, who makes statements about anything that leaps to mind. "At work, I'm a robot," she added, enigmatically. Compare that, again, to the flesh-loving designers of runway fashion. Miss Monica doesn't design for the human body; she designs for the fabric, the material. She's a material girl.

LILLY SPOON, AGENT 23

Okay, maybe not a material girl, because anyone who knows Monica knows that's the wrong decade. Monica is a child of the '60s (even though neither she nor her mother is old enough to have been an adult in the '60s), a girl firmly fixated on the kitsch and clatter of that most American of decades. "That's the era when the biggest amount of cutting edge stuff happened," she explained. "Once it hit the '70s, it wasn't new anymore. There were some new things in the '90s, but not as new."

Monica herself is a throwback. She wears bulky square glasses just like the ones my mom has on in her college yearbook picture. She has a close-cropped bob haircut (turned out at the edges similar to a Lego man's). She dresses up every Wednesday to hit the Snake Pit's mod party, often wearing one of her Austin Powers Fembot wigs. She is immersed in the rhetoric of retrofuturism ... one might wonder if she saw a few too many "Jetsons" episodes as a child.

"It's just always been my style. I feel gypped I wasn't my age in the '60s," she said with the trace of a pout, the closest her face gets to a frown.

Monica was born in Denver and raised in Englewood and Edgewater, attending Jefferson High School in Jefferson County. She went to the Cornish School of Art in Seattle for a year, but left because it wasn't for her and way too pricey. So, aside from that year, a trip to Sweden to visit a friend, and a recent junket to Vegas, Monica has always been a Denver girl.

"Denver's culture is there, it's just really hard to reach compared to either coast," she said. "You really have to look for it. But the general attitude here is good: everyone's nice. There's not a lot of tension here. And you have the mountains." She doesn't seem to mind much where she is, to be honest. She is, after all, a robot, a self-described "dress factory" and ambassador for a "disposable world." "I like plasticky hair with a plasticky dress, like every-one's a big, live doll," she said, showing me some pic-tures of dresses she made for a recent theme party. She created three matching dresses for her and her friends, only each back was different, cut to accentuate the wearer's back tattoos. "I've got polka dots in differ-ent colors and sizes down my spine. It kind of goes with the whole doll-slash-candy-robot thing." "I love uniforms, but only when they're not quite the same," she added. "It's like 'The Future Today', where every-one's personality is in the uniform. I could never wear a uniform to work, or even a business thing in an office, but I love uniforms anyway."

Monica works at Buzz Fill 'Er Up Cafe on 12th and Downing, where many of her more infamous pieces hang on the wall like discarded snake skins. One dress, made of old Lion coffee bags and held together with tape, retains almost perfect shape. "It looks like there's still a girl in there," she said.

She works the 7 am to 3 pm shift and just loves it. Every artist should be this content with their day job. "We're a real coffee shop, not a meet market like Diedrich's." Being a classic people-person (excuse me, people-robot), she enjoys the mix of clientele at Buzz. "We get everything. The only crowd we don't get is the smoking 14-year-olds ... you know, the angry ones who don't know what to do with their anger. I'm glad we don't get them."

"We have a lot of great regulars," she continued. "One guy, who lives around the corner, wants to turn the garage out back," where Altar and Vintage Garage previ-ously kept shop, "into an ice cream parlor. He's a motivational speaker type. He doesn't want to open up an ice cream shop himself, he just wants us to do it for him. He asks us all the time." The conversation stayed on the subject of great Denver coffeehouses of yore-- Muddy's, Common Grounds, The Black Pearl-- and it hit me that, for a robot, Monica's quite a judge of character. Just as she looks at material and sees the dress inside, she's able to judge a book by its cover in human terms, too. Later, she was telling me about her 60-year-old landlord who always shows up for repairs with a bucket of old parts and a gob of stories. Something in me knows that if I pressed, she'd be able to recite every story her landlord told her. She looks beyond the ordinary to find art, a talent that has been lost to the fashion world (so caught up in functionality). She opens a refrigerator and takes an apartment because of the butter hold inside. She spends all day in a coffee house then makes a dress out of the bags the coffee came in. She covers people in bubble wrap and packing tape, making a little package to unwrap for her keen mind. Monica Johnson-Moonlight-McSweetness-Spoon was made for this, which is why she has so much fun doing it.

"It's super fun," she said. And I realized it had been way too long since I'd heard someone use the phrase 'super fun' and mean it.

All photos by Gary Stefanski. Hair by Liz, Jade and Raul of Raul Salon & Color Studio. Makeup by Samara Cullinan. Photo assistant: Tim S. Art direction: Sean Hartgrove. Clothes by Monica Moonlight.