Magnolia Pearl Faces Backlash for Its ‘Poverty’ Aesthetic

Celebrities appreciate the antique look of Magnolia Pearl, a brand that takes inspiration from Victoriana, carnivals and “hobos,” and has recently drawn ire on social media.

Robin Brown, the lead designer of Magnolia Pearl, in her store in Fredericksburg, Texas.Credit...Abigail Enright for The New York Times

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By Kayleen Schaefer

Robin Brown sat on the patio of her home in Fredericksburg, Texas, in a dark pink bucket hat decorated with roses and birds, which covered most of her long platinum hair. Over video chat, the 59-year-old designer behind the fashion brand Magnolia Pearl was describing her aesthetic: butterflies, religious iconography, inspirational quotes, roses and lace.

All of it is oversize — meant to be piled on and rolled up — often faded, torn and patched, or dotted with tiny holes and stains. It’s theatrical, nostalgic and expensive, but still meant to be comfortable.

“I have a philosophy,” Ms. Brown said. “If you can’t climb a tree in it, then don’t make it.”

Ms. Brown started Magnolia Pearl in 2001 with handbags she sold out of her home in Bandera, Texas. She and her co-founder and husband, John Gray, added clothing in 2003 and took both to the Round Top antiques fair in Warrenton, Texas.

Today Magnolia Pearl has about 1,200 employees, a three-story flagship store in Fredericksburg and a newly opened store in the Malibu Country Mart in California — a destination for the rich and famous.

The clothes are also sold at Free People and at around 400 other stores in the United States and internationally, and embraced by celebrities. Taylor Swift wore a gauzy slip dress in her “cardigan” video from the “Folklore” album. Johnny Depp owns many items by Magnolia Pearl, like a T-shirt printed with the Buddha that he wore to sign legal paperwork after winning his defamation suit against Amber Heard, and a blue patchwork jacket he wore to a film festival in Barcelona.

The designer Betsey Johnson has been buying Magnolia Pearl for years. Her first purchase was a white ruffled petticoat, she said, and her most recent was a $2,000 rose-covered shrug. “She’s my Vivienne Westwood, my Alexander McQueen,” Ms. Johnson said.

Despite the famous clients, the brand’s version of distressed chic is an acquired taste, and one that many people take issue with.

At the end of March, Magnolia Pearl went viral on TikTok after a user named @chelseajordyn posted her mother’s Magnolia Pearl outfit: floral leggings with a cream lace dress and matching short jacket, and gray Charlie Chaplin-tramp-style shoes. Commenters then determined that the outfit cost about $5,000. (@chelseajordyn didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment for this article.)

“I love when people cosplay great depression poverty slayyyyy,” @Lizynco wrote. @My.pellow wrote, “really interesting how they look like hobos but their outfits cost a month of my pay.” @hanna_ariel wrote, “Did anyone else think it was all from goodwill.” The writer Rebecca Alter wrote a piece for Vulture in which she used Magnolia Pearl in joke fashion credits on a picture of Shrek in his cropped vest and white blouse.

Others on TikTok pointed out that Magnolia Pearl had done a “plantation” collection and used Native American imagery in its pieces — themes that many designers have been criticized for using, as conversations about appropriation became more common in the last decade.

“I have no clue what’s going on in the fashion world, and I don’t really want to have a clue,” Ms. Brown said. “All the negative things that people say about Magnolia Pearl lately, I don’t read those either.”

Magnolia Pearl is not the first brand to aestheticize poverty or itinerancy, and it’s certainly not the most famous or influential. In 2000, John Galliano designed a collection based on homeless people in Paris that became the inspiration for the parody “Derelicté” collection in the movie “Zoolander.”

Many American hippies in the 1960s embraced a beat-up, vintage carnival look. More recently, so-called prairie dresses were trendy, and many designers have experimented with making garments out of handmade vintage quilts — the embodiment of frugal, repurposed living. In malls all over the world, ripped jeans sell for more than $100.

Ms. Brown insists that her clothes are inspired by her own life and obsessions with Victorian-era designs, Oliver Twist, skateboarding, surfing, carnivals and, yes, hobos. “I notice some of the way they put their stuff together and the way the sun has bleached their clothing, and I find art in that,” she said.

She said her grandfather was a hobo, who owned a Ferris wheel he set up around San Antonio. Her parents, who are deceased, were artists, but she said her mother also worked as a prostitute and her father was a drug addict. The family was on food stamps, frequently homeless, and she and her brother ate out of dumpsters, she said.

Ms. Brown described the first dress she sewed at the age of 4, with her grandmother, made of chartreuse fabric with giant orange polka dots. “We sat at the machine and it came to life,” she said.

Her mother made and sold clothes too, out of a San Antonio shop she named Banana Funk N’ Junk. She took Ms. Brown with her to the ropa usadas in Nuevo Laredo and Brownsville, Texas, where used clothes come in big bales. “You cut them open and buy them by the pound,” Ms. Brown said. “We’d pick as a family and bring them home, and my mom would deconstruct them. She’d take slips and sew flannel sleeves on them.”

As Ms. Brown got older, she made her own clothes. In her 20s, while she was studying natural medicine at Hippocrates Wellness in West Palm Beach, Fla., she was at a mall and a woman ran after her to ask what she was wearing. Ms. Brown said the woman owned a store there and ended up buying all of the clothes she had brought with her.

“It left me with a pair of board shorts, a T-shirt with cumulus clouds on it and my Vans, so I wore that every day and washed it and laid it out in the sun,” she said. When she called Mr. Gray, at home in Texas, she brought up the idea of starting a business selling her clothes, but they decided it wasn’t the right time. (She and Mr. Gray met at a reggae concert in 1987, married in 2011, and have two Australian shepherds. Mr. Gray ran a retirement home before he and Ms. Brown founded Magnolia Pearl.)

Magnolia Pearl officially began in 2001 with bags, after a stranger in a parking lot insisted on buying the backpack Ms. Brown was carrying that she’d made out of a Jesus tapestry and kite string. (Her mother had just died; the stranger paid her about $600 for the bag, enough for Ms. Brown to retrieve her mother’s ashes.)

A friend offered Ms. Brown a small loan to make a run of 100 purses. A local morning show did a story on the bags, gave out her home phone number, “and the phone started ringing and it never stopped,” she said.

Today Johnny Depp is such a supporter of the brand that when he heard about the TikTok controversy, Ms. Brown said, he went outside where he was in Budapest and turned his back to the cameras following him to show the Magnolia Pearl label on his back.

Whoopi Goldberg, a fan of the brand, said about the TikTok backlash, “Listen, I’m sorry. If everybody bitches about everything, we’ll all be naked. I love TikTok. I think it’s great but, you know, calm down.”

Ms. Goldberg stumbled on the Magnolia Pearl website while browsing for interesting clothing and first bought knee-length bloomers, which she paired with an oversize shirt.

“I thought they were fun and very girly in a way that I am not girly,” she said. Since then, Ms. Goldberg has worn Magnolia Pearl coats with nipped-in waists and, recently, a kimono with an eyeball on the back. She emailed Ms. Brown because “I think it’s really important to let people know that they’ve really touched a nerve in you,” she said.

Ms. Brown wrote back and, during their correspondence, Ms. Goldberg mentioned how much she liked the top hat Ms. Brown was wearing in a photograph. So Ms. Brown mailed her the hat. Ms. Goldberg sent it back. “If my head had been smaller, I might have kept it,” she said.

Of the celebrity attention on her brand, Ms. Brown said it happened little by little: Helena Bonham Carter’s agent called; Emily Robison, of the Chicks, lived nearby in Bandera (Ms. Brown made her a diaper bag for her first child); and the designer Rachel Ashwell stopped by the Round Top booth.

For the Magnolia Pearl store in Fredericksburg, Ms. Brown and Mr. Gray imported three barns from elsewhere in the United States and stitched them together into one three-story building. Along with the clothes, there’s a rotating art installation and three kitchens serving vegan and organic food to employees. There are succulents and rock and shell tables, and, nearby, a grain silo has been turned into a guesthouse with an enormous claw foot bathtub.

Emily Eby, 31, a voting rights lawyer in Austin, visited a few years ago with her family. Her mother was charmed. She said it was very rustic and beautiful. Ms. Eby said she herself thought, “I might die in this place.”

“It was very ‘Saw’ chic,” she said. “There are piles of rag-looking fabrics and a disco ball hanging from a rotted beam.” She picked up a T-shirt and “it’s a $300 shirt that is falling apart.” She was befuddled as to why her mother thought it was so cool. “I work with a lot of people who deserve better than they’re getting in Texas,” she said. “It’s so frustrating to see rich culture emulating what they perceive as poor culture. Poor people in Texas don’t dress like Magnolia Pearl clothes, at least in the 2020s. It wasn’t dignified. It was very gawky.”

Ms. Brown sees things differently. “These aren’t cheap clothes that are cranked out,” Ms. Brown said about her designs. Magnolia Pearl makes, ages and distresses its own fabric, dyes and over-dyes it with mostly organic dyes, and creates each piece with lots of handwork. “One dress can sometimes take up to 30 days to make,” Ms. Brown said

When the folk singer Patty Griffin met Ms. Brown and learned her story, she was drawn to the clothes. Ms. Griffin grew up with very little money herself, but spent most of her life trying to look well-off. As she has gotten older, Ms. Griffin has started wearing Magnolia Pearl.

“I love that her stuff kind of pushes me back out there in a way that I have to get out of my shell,” she said.

Ms. Brown was once ashamed of her past, she said, but Mr. Gray prompted her to tell that story, to show people where she’d come from and that she’d succeeded. “Letting people know that I grew up in poverty only inspires them,” she said. “You have to get over the shame so you can contribute and so that you can make the world a better place. If you live in your shame, you can’t do anything.”

An earlier version of this article misnamed the TikTok user who posted a video about her mother’s Magnolia Pearl outfit. The user was @chelseajordyn, not @chelseajordan. The article also misstated the town in Texas where Magnolia Pearl sold its clothes at an antiques fair. It is Warrenton, not Warrington.

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