INEZ AND VINHOODH/TRUNK ARCHIVE
Do you remember where you were when Prince Rogers Nelson stepped onto the stage of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in 2012, shimmering in a gold tassel blazer to perform “Rock & Roll Love Affair”? Or when, two years later on “Saturday Night Live,” he shrugged off his jacket to reveal an intricately embroidered gold vest underneath? How about when he stoically graced the cover of V Magazine in 2013, hand on his heart, suited in a dazzling mosaic jacket fit for royalty? Maybe you don’t recall these particular moments, or perhaps they get lost in the purple haze of many fond yet indiscernible memories surrounding Minneapolis’ hometown hero.
But there are two women who remember these late-career milestones with perfect clarity. Catharine Robinson and Lori Marcuz, founders of clothing design company Call and Response, sat in their small workshop on Queen Street West in Toronto, watching in awe—and sometimes disbelief—as one of the most influential musicians of all time wore their hand-stitched creations.
As I connect with these two women over a Zoom call in late June, I am unsure of what to expect. After all, these are the designers who dressed Prince from the height of his “3rd Eye” era until his death—a period of time when his stylistic and cultural influence were as ubiquitous as ever. But what I found were two modest and low-profile Canadians—neither too eager to take credit for their accomplishments—who look back on this wild and inexplicable timespan almost as if it were a dream.
“It was golden, I mean, we were dressing Prince. But here’s the thing: He was so private, so we never even talked about it while he was alive,” shares Robinson. “Like anything, it could be frustrating. But I’d always go to that video of him with Tom Petty playing ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps,’ and think to myself, ‘That’s who you’re dressing.’ You know, ‘You’re dressing the man who just did that.'”
Expecting some remarkable, serendipitous tale, I ask how the collaboration came about in the first place. How did Prince stumble upon these small-batch, experimental designers with sewing machines (still) lining the back of their retail shop, and no more than three pairs of hands running the entire operation? Robinson cures my curiosity, matter-of-factly: “He was in town, and he found out about us. That’s all.”
PHOTO BY JOE LEMKE
Prince was an enigma. While bold and confessional in his songwriting, he was known for being private and guarded in his personal life. Robinson and Marcuz never met him. Never emailed, wrote, or called. They coordinated shipments and pickups through his managers and took their best guesses at his measurements by snapping photos of him on their grainy TV screens. These women never actually knew Prince. But, as they speak of him, I get a sense that, in a rather a poignant way, they did.
“I didn’t know his politics, I didn’t know his religion, and I don’t think I cared one way or the other,” says Robinson. “You know, he was an iconic musician, and that’s who I wanted to dress.”
The pair studied the style of his proclaimed idols: Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder. They would watch countless videos of his performances, analyze his lyrics, and play his albums softly in the background as their sewing machines hummed into the late hours of the night. They operated off intuition and risk, working quickly and quietly as the world pushed their designs into the limelight, often uncredited. Their creations spoke before their minds had a chance to, acting as Prince’s shadow voice; his visual endorsement of the avant-garde, the strange, and the unusual—of the beauty that can be found in the smaller, lesser-known corners of fashion and culture.
“In a strange way, we really did feel connected to him,” says Robinson. “The whole thing was very emotional. It was like we were in this lovely little envelope [of secrecy], but it made us happy, kept us moving.”
As the duo shares the tales behind some of their well-remembered ensembles, it becomes clear that their relationship with Prince was based on a mutual level of trust and respect for one another’s craft; Prince entrusting them to create something unusual and remarkable, while respecting his privacy (as Robinson says: “We didn’t have to sign an NDA because we never said a damn word”), and Robinson and Marcuz trusting that they might one day get to see their garments on a red carpet from their TV screens in Toronto. Although they never spoke, they had established their own nonverbal form of communication—a language shaped and sustained by their closely linked artistic outputs, both of which the world watched and applauded.
“I remember the first jacket I made for him,” says Robinson. “It was a gold jacket that he wore to the Welcome to Australia tour. And it was kind of lovely because we had no money and no time. So, the gold leather is actually leather that we had spray painted gold, and it was fabulous.”
Many of the team’s favorite designs have a backstory similar to this—inadvertent, spur-of-the-moment creations fueled by limited resources and exorbitant creativity, an art they like to call “guerrilla fashion.” Robinson had constructed the aforementioned gold embroidered vest from “Saturday Night Live” from a set of antique wall hangings she sourced in Indonesia. “I spent a fortune on those things. They were the best pieces of somebody’s collection,” she says. “And bit by bit, I kept taking them down from the wall and cutting them up and putting them into the vest.”
This knack for turning ordinary things into art has stuck with the team, even long after Prince’s death. In 2019, they were commissioned by his estate to create an exclusive designer collection based on his “1999” album for his most devoted fans. The nostalgic collection of jackets, vests, and hand-dyed tunics (many of which are still available for preorder) continues to breathe Prince’s futuristic, boundary-pushing style into the world—a fraction of which was shaped by Call and Response’s innovative vision.
I note that their work still reverberates in today’s culture—evident in artists like Harry Styles, whose bold, gender-fluid stagewear recalls Prince’s late-career looks. In true form, Robinson and Marcuz are hesitant to take credit for this, content instead to have played their part in shaping a look that sits indelibly frozen in Prince’s world.
Photo by Joe Lemke
Regardless of their low profiles in the fashion world (they have just over 3,000 followers on Instagram, while Prince’s still-active account has nearly 1 million), the duo’s influence lingers, and their art is irrevocably weaved into the threads of Prince’s enduring legacy—a legacy they’ll never stop pioneering. Take their collaboration with the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport for example, where they maintain a collection of T-shirts and graphic hoodies at the pop-up Prince boutique. Or their collaboration with the reigning UEFA champion soccer team Paris St. Germaine—a collection of hoodies and jerseys that pays tribute to the musical icon on one of the biggest stages in sports.
“It feels lovely when people choose to collaborate with us, because Prince had other great designers that he worked with. But he really wore our stuff nonstop, for a long time,” says Marcuz.
Before our call ends, I leave the pair with one final question, which had been burning in the back of my mind for much of our conversation: “Do you wish you had been able to meet him?”
As it turns out, Prince tried to fly the team out to Paisley Park just a few years before his death, but Robinson wasn’t able to get her passport together in time. The opportunity came and went, along with the dreamy, ephemeral glow of calling Prince their main client. Had they gotten on that plane, shaken hands, and snapped a photo with Prince, would their lives be different today? Maybe. But Robinson is convinced everything happened just as it was meant to.
“I was okay with it, because things worked out brilliantly the way they were,” she says. “We got to make Prince look like a prince. And it was fabulous.”
