About Alice

Alice Berry has worked exclusively as clothing designer for twenty five years, earning her degree in fine art in 1980 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After school, Alice spent four years working in Paris for private clients, creating collections for small boutiques, showing textiles and clothing art in galleries, learning the business --developing a style of her own. 

In 1984 Alice returned to Chicago an opened her first studio where she designed and manufactured one of a kind clothing, which was sold privately and at boutiques such as "City" in Chicago. From 1984 to 1998 Alice worked with fabrics from designers and companies such as Junichi Arai, Japan; Memphis Design Group, Italy; La Soie de Paris, France; and Fisac, Italy furthering her style and craft. In 1989 Alice married her husband Tom and began to expand her business and her line, creating and manufacturing  a line of knitwear. The first line of scarves based on interactive color theory and texture emerged in 1993. Alice gave birth to her son TJ, in 1995. During 1995 and 1996 responding to the changing times, Alice transitioned from one of a kind clothing to a line of scarves and simple, interesting clothing shapes. Her scarves with their unique use of fabric, transparency and color began to gain popularity. In 1997, Alice began to distribute her scarf line wholesale, selling to boutiques and museum across the U. S. and internationally. As a continuing investigation of her interest in color, texture and composition in design, Alice began works that were meant for interior and window treatments and these pieces were shown in galleries and homes. This more artistic direction of her work has become a separate medium to explore this developing interest. Most recently, Alice has been working with translating concepts from Abstract Expressionist painters such as Josef Albers, Mark Rothko and others and this work has been recognized by various museums around the country such as the Philadelphia Museum, National Academy of Design, and the Weisman Museum, among others. 

Now entering another phase of her career, she is returning to the clothing world to create a line of separates from fabrics and textures of interest to her as well as shapes and cuts she's known for. Jackets, tops and simple well fitting bottoms that will answer the call for interesting and well designed garments for women not currently well served in the marketplace.

Artistic Statement

Sometimes it takes a while to find the work that resonates with who you are. As for me, after years of making clothing for private clients as well as for the retail market, I came to my scarf line as if by process of elimination. Coming out of baby land from the birth of my son, I found the only requests from the stores I had been working with were for the scarves I had begun to do as a sideline a few years before. As I developed the line, I found myself understanding the relationships between colors and textures in a much more profound way, and I began to look with a fresh eye at the work of the abstract expressionists such as Rothko, Rhinehart, Louis, etc., as well as the work of the artists and designers of the postwar bauhaus , particularly Josef and Anni Albers, who systematized a way of looking at color that was logical, as well as encompassing the emotional experience of really considering color. Over the past several years I have come to realize that color is experiential, and belongs to the same realm of experience as listening to music. I think color and light are related to each other in the same way that music and sound are related. The seeing of light or the hearing of sound is essentially the perception of vibrations by the ear or the eye. In working with the colors in relationships as I do, I think of them as compositions working in the same way as a group of notes creates a chord or a phrase of music. Thinking of this I realized that many of the same terms describing color and music are interchangeable. One refers to tonal or atonal musical compositions, or harmonious or discordant colors. I continue to explore and be amazed by the relationships between colors and the idea of color in the world, and I hope to learn new ways to express it through my work