Jerry Lee Atwood: Indianapolis Designer of Custom Western and Nudie Suits
Below is a transcript:
The type of machine I use—the old chain-stitch embroidery machines—as you’re embroidering, it's like painting with thread. You're sitting at the machine, filling in and making decisions in the moment. You can manipulate the machine to have a directional stitch and then change the direction so the way the light hits it—even though you're just using one color—you get a lot of depth and a lot of texture just in that color field.
My name is Jerry Lee Atwood, and I'm a fashion designer and tailor for Union Western Clothing Company here in Indianapolis, Indiana. When I discovered embroidery and putting embroidery on clothing, then putting that on a person, it's like a person becomes this walking canvas.
I feel like I've been pretty lucky to make suits for a lot of celebrities: Post Malone, Lil Nas X, Orville Peck, Diplo, most recently, Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Every once in a while, I'll go to the “Old Town Road” video, just to see how many people have watched it now. Going from when I started making western wear and thinking if I'm lucky, maybe a small band from Indianapolis will wear my stuff on tour and be seen in front of a couple hundred people at a show every night to something I've made has been seen by hundreds of millions, potentially over a billion people just blows my mind.
The History of Western Wear and Nudie Suits
I was an art school dropout and ended up working in coffee shops. I just got this idea to make western shirts, and I borrowed my roommate's sewing machine and made a really horrific western shirt.
It brought back a lot of nostalgia. My dad had all these old country albums that had people in their western suits on the covers, embroidery and rhinestones and arrow pockets. That really came to prominence in the late ’40s to early ’50s with tailors like Nudie Cohn, Rodeo Ben, and Nathan Turk.
The term that most people use is “nudie suit.” Nudie was the most well-known. He brought it into pop culture. The country musicians in the ’50s and ’60s—so if you're somebody like Porter Wagoner or Webb Pierce and you were playing in a small town in Oklahoma or Indiana or wherever—you're bringing the glitz and glamor to them. I think it was a way of paying respect to your audience.
Generally, a customer will come to me with an idea and motifs that they want on the suit. I'll work on some sketches inspired by their ideas. Right now I'm making this suit; this is for a customer who is getting married. He likes these vintage guitars; I think he has a collection of guitars.
From Sketch to Finished Suit: The 120-Hour Process
This is the perfect example of working with the customer and kicking ideas back and forth, coming up with a really strong vision for the direction of the suit. I’ll draft up a mock-up suit, and then I go to the machine and embroider everything—which is a several days long process—we’ll rhinestone everything, and then do all the tailoring. The suit gets sewn together and finished and sent out to the customer. From cutting to finishing, the actual work on the suit is about 120 hours. Usually I have a month or so from when I start a suit to when I need to send it out. It's not a long window to do a lot of work.
My canned answer is always the next suit I make is my favorite. But of things that I've actually made, it's the Stranger Things suit far and away my favorite suit that I've made. It's just really, really densely embroidered and has a lot of rhinestones. I remember watching Stranger Things and thinking if I made a Stranger Things suit, how I would incorporate some of these different themes and images in the show.
My own suit that I made is the Indiana suit. It has corn and a carnation, a cow in a field, with a tornado in the background.
Country music was always like the lame music that my dad listened to. It's interesting to see this thing that was so closely associated with country musicians rise to prominence in our modern—somewhat polarized—society and American society. These suits are becoming popular again and being worn by many, many different types of people, not just country musicians, but hip hop artists, sports people, actors. People from across political and cultural backgrounds can come together in an appreciation of this art form.
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The above video is a clip from Journey Indiana from WTIU. You can watch more segments and full episodes at pbs.org/show/journey-indiana/