Recherché!

Pamela Burkland

The Belgian Sisters of the Sacred Heart considered it essential to the education of any young lady that she learn to speak French, write exquisitely beautiful letters in perfect penmanship, curtsy appropriately, and finally execute small French sewing stitches. Thus was Pamela Burkland, Recherché’s designer, introduced in fourth grade at Sacred Hearts Academy in Honolulu, Hawaii, to the art of fine hand-sewing – perfect stitches in perfectly straight lines whether joining seams, hemming, or edging. Sewing became a life-long avocation.

During the era of “Flower Power,” Pamela turned psychedelic fabric into trippy dresses and bell-bottoms for The Sunshine Company in Portland, Oregon, a very small shop in Old Town with a very short history. Children came along and with them the challenge of creating little tiny bellbottoms out of recycled legs of adult jeans and little flowered shirts and dresses.

Working for a Fortune 500 company as an international trade services manager, included nights at the sewing machine turning out about 65% of her personal wardrobe by hand with regular business trips overseas allowing the purchase of unusual accessories to enhance the home-made business clothes. Pamela was always looking for the unusual color or a designer drape to a suit skirt, or a pin-striped fabric cut into a non-traditional suit style.

Recherché began with a pile of antique lace trims and a family legacy of tattered Victorian baby clothes too beautiful to be thrown away. Out of these materials came small potpourri bags that initially sold at a shop on S.E. Hawthorne. Requests, ideas, gifts of used fabric, all suggested many kinds of bags, and Pamela created many of them and even sold some. But the defining moment was a gift from an exquisite quilter with a huge studio, of six black antique Japanese obis – uncut. Her words were: “I bought too many of these; maybe you can figure out something to do with them.” For months the bag of Japanese obis sat in a corner of the dining room until one day Pamela started folding them and the Obi Bag was born. The first one she made, she gave as a gift to the quilter who had given her the obis. Since then, the line has become very popular, selling in wearable art boutiques in Portland. A secondary line of discreet, black moiré bags, was born when a friend was looking at one of the designs made up and said: “We used to call those Opera Bags.”

For Pamela, the mindfulness incorporated into the hand-stitching of each bag offered for sale is an act of meditation and an act of joy in creating a one-of-a-kind piece of weable art. Launching this website is an attempt to reach a wider audience of women interested in art clothing and accessories, and to be able to build on what has been created so far with intense interest in what the future may yet reveal from a design perspective.