When Mary Meyer isn’t designing graphic clothes or throwing blowout parties, she’s probably hanging out with kids, helping them realize their acting/screenwriting/directing dreams. She and her pal Bonnie Pipkin, who has a theater background, run an after-school program called Step Right Up. “We’ve personally done five plays, and then we’ve facilitated two more,” Mary explains. “With fashion, you just get so self-absorbed, and it’s so great to have a few hours a week where you absolutely are not thinking about yourself.” Here, Mary describes three of the fantastically entertaining productions she’s put on. From the Step Right Up production of Legend of the Zombie Curse. Legend of the Zombie Curse“The kids write the plays in that it’s all their ideas, but with the little ones we have to do more work than with the teenagers, because sometimes the plots are meandering. We have all these workshopping techniques to develop characters. In this one, the zombies live in a world where they eat brains, and the portal to the human world has been shut off. A teenage zombie named George who is just bored and curious and rebellious figures out how to go through the portal. He meets a girl and falls in love with her. She teaches him about pizza and ice cream and stuff.” The Last Sound“We started the program working with fifth graders in the Lower East Side, and now we go to a second school at the corner of Bushwick and Williamsburg. It’s a high school, so it’s completely different—and I love it. I totally thought they were going to eat us alive, but they are so cool and so capable—abstract thinking and stuff. Our most recent play was amazing. It was this post-apocalyptic tragedy that takes place in New York City. It opens with a nuclear war—there is a big death scene with swords—where everybody dies except a limited few. It has a very abstract ending with two star-crossed lovers. You don’t know whether they will they die or rebirth society.” Return of Super Ice Wolf!“This is the first play we did. Super Ice Wolf was a girl who fell in love and got her heart broken. She decided, in her wisdom, that it would be better to freeze her own heart and the hearts of the world so nobody would have to go through that again—to stop love. So she became Super Ice Wolf—it’s such a good name. She had this machine that froze hearts, and she had ice cubs that assisted her. So she was doing that, and the world kept getting colder and colder. Finally her sister figured out what was happening, and, with the help of her uncle, melted Super Ice Wolf’s heart by hugging her. It was very cute.” Click here to get involved with Step Right Up—and here to check out the scarf Mary made for Of a Kind.

Mary Meyer, master of the graphic print, was quite the happening kid, never afraid to take style risks. “When I was in second grade, I had hair to my butt. Then I saw a picture of this girl in a magazine, and I cropped it to a pixie cut,” she says. Here, she explains the three different worlds she was brought up in and the aesthetic takeaways that influence her designs. “What is this look I’m rocking? These shoes—look at how big they are on me. They were my mom’s, and I refused to not wear them. I was about nine.” Growing up in Venice Beach“I was born in the woods in Northern California, but when I was young, my mom and I moved to Venice—we lived a block from the boardwalk in the eighties. So at six, seven, eight—when I was just starting to go out and be by myself—Venice Beach was such a huge influence, with all the graphic tees and the surfer, skater, punk, and rebel aesthetics. I was totally obsessed with it.” At right, wearing a very eighties, very Venice T-shirt. Hanging Out in Hollywood“My mom was in the film business in late-eighties/early-nineties L.A. The women were wearing big shoulder pads, and my mom had a perm. The party she took me to that was the craziest—and maybe that’s just because I was a kid—was the wrap party for Big at Penny Marshall’s house. Remember that scene from Big where Tom Hanks’s character gets his first paycheck, and they buy that spray confetti stuff? They had tons of that left over. I was allowed to bring a friend to the party, and we went nuts with the spray confetti.” “That’s my ninth grade class photo. I like it because it’s so nineties.” Traveling to NYC“My father was from Manhattan, and my grandparents lived on the Upper West Side—I would come to New York a few times a year. Everything was so glamorous. When I was 12, I came out without my parents. My uncle, who lived in the Chelsea Hotel and was a very cool guy, took me shopping and to the museums. He was a party guy, so we were hanging out with all kinds of art-scene people.” Check out the limited-edition scarf Mary created for Of a Kind that very much nails her aesthetic.

Once you get to know Mary Meyer’s prints, you can spot them anywhere: The striking, elemental designs have a sort of tribal, sort of eighties thing going on—with a bit of darkness thrown in. Here, she explains how she makes them and what appeals to her about the one she chose for our scarf. Score one of the awesome black, white, and blue scarves Mary made for Of a Kind here. Paintings used for prints in her spring collection. On coming up with her designs:“For several months, I’ll be thinking about it—I’m constantly taking pictures of cool geometric shadows and things like that. Then I’ll kind of go for it. I’ll spend a few days painting. Usually I have about four to six prints for a collection. For my fall 2011 collection, several of the prints were inspired by African jewelry—those big pieces that look like breastplates or armor—that I saw at the Met.” Mary with a tank featuring an imperfect square print. On her screening techniques:“The kind of screen-printing used for college T-shirts is called plastisol—it’s plastic that sits on the surface and never changes. Instead, I use a water-based method for my black and color prints. Basically, you’re printing a dye that still feels like ink but actually changes the fabric—once you wash it, it just becomes part of the fabric and gets softer with time. When I print in white on a black fabric, it’s called discharge. I hate that term. You print this transparent putty onto the material and put it through heat, and the chemical process draws the pigment out of the fabric. It’s like bleaching but doesn’t degrade the fabric. Sara Gates of Cook & Gates is my screen-printer, and she has a really incredible studio in Greenpoint.” A dress from Mary’s spring collection featuring a print that reminds her of a ribcage. On the Blue Hex scarf print:“For the white part, I printed up a perfect rectangle and then painted over it so that the edge isn’t perfect. I like to see the hand—but just a little. You can tell if it’s all just photoshopped. The blue print has this skeletal feel—it’s sort of like a ribcage—but it looks a little bit tribal and a little bit goth, too. That, for me, is just about right.”