She’s done seven clothing lines of entirely black. She works in vinyl and lace, mesh and satin, safety pins and fishnet — all black, down to the thread used on inside stitching. The eighth line branched out from all black all the time. Three of the new pieces are as white as a desert-bleached rib cage.

She smiles and laughs all the time.

“Why do I have to be this angry person covered in skull tattoos to wear black?” she said.

Clothing designer Nicole Marét of The Order isn’t black and white herself, even though her clothes have all been one or the other. She has long hair dipped purple at the tips, bright bright bright red lipstick, various costume jewels and gems shining from gold and silver jewelry. She likes that her personal fashion doesn’t match gothy, punky, industrialy stereotypes any more than her laughter does.

“Whenever I’m out and about and somebody asks what I do and I say that I’m a clothing designer, you immediately get the up and down,” she said. “A lot of times I just end up wearing leggings and a sweatshirt or something because I get covered in paint, I snag everything. And I’ll be in a coffee shop and tell someone I’m a designer and they’re like…

[Here Marét jumps into a tone of frenemy sarcasm and scrunches her face skeptically.]

“‘Ohhhh… Really?’”

The Baby-Sitters Club

Purple-tipped, red-lipsticked, black-designing Nicole’s early inspiration came from 1980s/1990s tween-before-they-were-called-tween novel series “The Baby-Sitters Club.” Marét, now 33, would slice apart her leggings, repinning them in funky new ways to be like her fictional idol.

“I was a massive, massive Baby-Sitters Club fan. There was a girl in the Baby-Sitters Club named Claudia Kishi, who was this super-artsy girl and she was always hiding junk food under her bed and making ridiculous things,” Nicole said. “I can’t remember if she did anything to her clothes, but she was kind of my muse, I think, at a very young age, and I wanted so desperately to be her, or be like her, that I think [slicing leggings] was my interpretation of her artistic tendencies.”

College took her to California and an eventual art degree — not the original intent, but after years of course-hopping, a guidance counsellor told her she was closest to graduating if she declared an art major.

Other than elaborate Halloween costumes — one year she covered a ball gown in old vinyl LPs and went as “Music” — fashion was more hobby than passion. Her desire was to be a beach bum.

Back home in Illinois and working full time as a graphic designer, Nicole Marét was miserable.

“I was making clothes in my spare time — poorly, I have to admit. I had no idea what I was doing. I was taping and safety-pinning things together. My mom actually encouraged me to go back to school. She was saying ‘You really hate what you’re doing, you want to do this instead, then I think you should go back, learn how to do it right and see where you can go from there.’”

She went to “one of those chains” for fashion school, the type of college that advertises on buses and designed its name to be uncomfortably similar to more prestigious institutions.

She loved it. She wasn’t there to put a fancy name on her diploma, but to put technical skills into her clothing.

“If this industry, nobody really cares,” she said of falutin’ names, high or otherwise. “If you have a great portfolio and you can do what you say you can do, that’s pretty much all that matters.”

Goth Glam

Black isn’t just black. There are cooler shades, warmer ones, matte, shiny, clear, opaque, mesh, vinyl, satin, cotton, crushed and painted organza so you pull it out and the moment you let go the skirt recrinkles into the exact same folds and wrinkles scalded into paint and silk. She makes giant anime bows, willowy lingerie, fun tops for going out on the town. Every piece slinks around a woman’s body, every stitch is black as a sinner’s soul.

“One of the fun things about working in such a simple color palette is you get to play with texture — a lot,” she said.

She calls it “goth glam” when people press her for a term, but her clients include stay-at-home moms, real estate agents, her own mother.

“I think I’ve always liked the creative limitation, having boundaries of some sort,” she said of her one-tone playlist. “It forces you to look for opportunities where you might not otherwise.”

The fashion grad’s typical career path goes from graduation to working as a pattern-maker or sample-maker for a designer in New York or Los Angeles “eating ramen every night and living in a shoebox.” Neither the shoebox nor spending years stitching together someone else’s vision appealed to Nicole, so, funded by her graphic design work, she hung a shingle in Chicago, working in secret until her first launch in 2010.

“My parents knew. My friends knew I was working on some kind of fashion thing, but that was about it. Nobody really knew what to expect,” she said.

The release party in the back room of a Wicker Park steakhouse was a hit. Each of the seven subsequent lines have come with a launch party in a different space. Florists, photo studios, an interior design office and her own Pilsen loft have hosted past dos.

She didn’t want to make someone else’s clothing, and she doesn’t want anyone else to make hers.

“I did actually try working with a sample maker. She did a beautiful job, but I lost so much of the process that I enjoy, and it forces you to commit to something before it’s done. ‘Here’s the sketch, this is what I want,’ and then they bring it back and you don’t get to experience that part where you change it as you go and you maybe do a different fabric, and I love that.”

Love hurts at times.

“I think my neighbors in here probably hear my machine, tons of profanity, then the machine again, then tons of profanity,” she said, laughing again.

To Business

After The Order’s 10th line is released — she’s guessing fall of next year — Nicole Marét is going to rethink her life.

Is The Order her future? Will she take another career path and make clothes on the side? Will she focus on her profitable lingerie line? Will she hire staff? Will she call it a day? Will she run off to California to reread Baby-Sitters Club books by the Santa Barbara beach she still misses? [Editor’s note: That last one’s the least likely.]

Nicole has given herself until The Order’s 10th outing to decide how this passion should stay a business.

Making a go of fashion has hurdles. Cost is one — people give lip service to Made in America, but check the label on the shirt you’re wearing right now. Even as I’m writing this sentence, my typing fingers say “Buy American,” my collar neck says “Made in Mauritius,” a country recently in headlines for sweatshops paying $1 an hour and sleeping 16 workers a room to crank out “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” tees.

Marét hand-stitches every piece by herself in Pilsen. She’ll outsource big orders to local sample-makers, but she jokes on her website that “Made in China” means CHIcago, North America.

Knowing this keeps Marét’s line edgy. She won’t get people to pay handmade costs for factory product.

“Are you going to spend more on a body suit because I made it here in my studio in Chicago and it’s kind of cool and there’s a concept behind the brand? Are you willing to spend more on that than something kind of similar that was made in China that you can buy in Zara?”

But being too edgy is a concern as well. Another of Marét’s foes is “fast fashion,” exactly to-the-moment on-trend finery that will line the bottom of stylish dressers in six months.

From a black-swaddled artists loft in Pilsen, Nicole Marét doesn’t want unique. She wants singular. She wants to clothe the women who see what she’s doing and fall in love.

“One of my big goals is to find the people that want the piece that they’re going to keep wearing, that they celebrate, that they think of as a piece of art they bought for a reason,” she said.

And then she smiled and laughed.

Meet the perfume magician who introduced me to Nicole

Meet a (now Nashville-based) lingerie designer getting inspiration from grandma

Meet two women creating art in video, now in development by HBO

And art on the trapeze

I know they exist, that they’re out there burning away in a deep black eternity, the smallest still on a scale grander than I have capacity to comprehend. But on a street corner in Pilsen, they’re drowned out, washed away by overhead lamps, security lights and the glow of a late-night gym full of sweaty people in activewear.

But that’s OK.

There are stories behind these darkened windows along the Pilsen corner. There are tales of families and love, of couples fighting, of languid nights and of artists plying away alone just hoping to get a dab better with each new work. I was down in Pilsen to talk to one of those artists, and I’ll post that in a few weeks after I compile notes and take down tape recordings. This isn’t that story.

And that’s OK too.

Pilsen is a changing place. The Mexican-American enclave by factories that don’t open anymore is facing an influx of the young and crafty. Murals now show Anglo faces and I spent $2.50 on a single piece of chocolate daubed with gold leaf and spiced like curry. It was my dessert after slamming a few pierogi in a bar full of construction workers in union hoodies. Pilsen doesn’t yet know what it wants to be.

And now, after pierogi and curry chocolate, after an interview at an artists loft and a brief nighttime stroll to a bus stop by a glowing gym, I stood wondering about stars I couldn’t see.

This is life.

This is it, the big show. This is the main event. Boring, happy moments are just as much a part of the picture as the heart-rending triumphs or losses, as those burning stars or burning artists we can’t always see. Life is standing, waiting, aging, sipping, downing overpriced chocolates or underpriced pierogi. We wait for buses, for inspiration, for someone to tweet something interesting so we don’t have to spend any seconds so surely bored. The stars burn hydrogen, the sweatsters in activewear burn calories, the artists burn the midnight oil hoping to whittle ourselves into the people we want to be.

It’s all here on a street corner that glows brighter than distant suns. Life is waiting for a Pilsen bus on a spring night as clear and sharp as broken glass.

Another scene from Pilsen

More pierogi

And, just for fun, a breakdancer

He was in the McDonald’s where Western meets Milwaukee, a spot at the exact confluence of urban poverty and rich kids playing poor through their 20s. He was clearly amid the latter, but not above a quick burger no one has ever referred to as “artisanal,” “gourmet,” or “gastro-”

Despite his choice of meatstuff, he was a perfect physical specimen. Glamor muscles toned, tanned and tatted, he wore a tight black T-shirt to show off the same.

He looked the perfect median between salon and saloon, like he could either be heading to a stylist or a bar brawl. Fashionable yet tough. Coiffed yet ready to throw down.

Untouchable. Unstoppable. Like I assume his arm tattoos bragged.

Or, since he was wearing a T-shirt with sleeves just long enough to take three letters off, OUCHABLE and TOPPABLE.

That’s a funny thing I saw.

There’s always some humor in walking the streets. A muscleman bragging by error that he could be topped and would say “ouch.” Some sharp graffiti. A downtown store advertising that Vladimir Putin hacked their system to give out incredible savings.

A friend framed a photo she took of a chicken darting across a road in Pilsen. “Why?” she asked. “Why?”

It’s nice that life doles out the silly alongside the grim. It’s always pleasant when something takes your mind for the moment off tasks and trends and the news outside.

Even if it’s just to laugh at a muscleman.

A sadder tale of McDonald’s

They rushed up to fill plastic bowls and extra-large McDonald’s beverage cups. Sometimes they rushed the water back to an inflatable kiddie pool a few blocks down. Sometimes they took long gulps of crystalline water that may or may not have been treated for disease.

Pilsen was hot.

All of Chicago was hot, of course. Derechos, fronts and vortices have made this summer a schizoid mess of cool and swelter, shorts and sweaters.

The meter on Tuesday just swung to swelter.

In some places, people clung to air conditioning. The denizens of towers and office blocks and skyscraper condos no doubt pressed themselves against the Freon as closely as could.

But in Pilsen, the children played in the stream of a cracked-open fire hydrant.

They laughed and ran, as children do. They joked and pushed, as children do.

The group of soaking-wet kids, bright clothing plastered to them, shrieked as joyful on their hot concrete sidewalk as I once did running through a lawn sprinkler decades ago.

I had come in a car-sharing car to pick up some packages. As I waited, the magic flickering “I can park anywhere I want as long as these are on” blinkers clicked on off on off as Bruce Springsteen wailed over the radio about how terrible New Jersey is.

The AC was on. I was pressed against Freon like the rest.

Then I saw the children play.

I felt myself flip off the AC, turn down the radio, open the window into the slick-hot damp swelter outside. I saw my hand turn off the ignition until there were only the happy laughters of children and the click off on of blinkers as soundtrack.

The laughter of children was the soundtrack on a hot Pilsen night.

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More dancing immortals

Another hot night

“Hi,” I said. “Here for the film?”

The tiger head was of the mascot variety. She and I had both volunteered to be in a mutual acquaintance’s student film, a love story about furries.

For the next several hours, that spring day in 2012, I wooed a pregnant woman while dressed as a polar bear. I would stride down the street, hand in paw with my leading lady, my wizard’s cap flapping in the breeze (the polar bear costume was a wizard for some reason) and spend breaks chatting with the nice woman with the tiger head.

I couldn’t stay for the final scene — a furry dance party. I had to go early. It was a Saturday and I had to make sure to be back in the suburbs for work.

I won’t go into bitchy, years-old details about the job that kept me working seven days a week at odd late hours for a bit of money and a lot of shame at any sign you weren’t having the time of your life. I hated that place. That comes in later.

I got a Facebook friend request from the tiger-headed woman. I clicked yes and didn’t think much of it. I didn’t know at the time she would become my roommate for two years.

Aside from the tiger head and the polar bear wizard, another key player in this story was the shitty job. It got worse, I got worse and in the middle of a meeting about my performance, I quit. I felt the words spill out of my mouth, followed by a deep sense of peace. This was right. I had lunch with a friend after the meeting and immediately started planning my new life.

A couple days later, I even went Facebook public about the quitting but more advertising the fact I was going to move back to Chicago.

Then I got a Facebook message from the tiger-headed woman. She wanted to be roommates.

After the obligatory jokes about one or both of us being serial killers, I started to consider it. After all, my decisions based on reason and logic had landed me in the job I nicknamed Coming Darkness. Maybe it was time to just spin the wheel, see where it landed.

We met for coffee at a Caribou in the suburbs. I noticed she brought her own silverware rather than use disposable plastic ones. Huge environmentalist, that one. The silverware sold me.

We talked for a long time. She was a copy editor at a daily on the Indiana side of the border. She was looking for her own reinvention, her own spin of the wheel. We had similar budgets and lifestyle requirements, but more than that, we got along. I could tell she was a good person. That goes a long way with me.

Then we moved in. Spun the wheel. This was followed by two years of roommate stuff, of bills and rent checks, of struggling with that damn toilet, of late-night bourbon in the back yard, of midnight conversations about life, the future and Joss Whedon’s “Firefly.”

My plan to get a new life worked better than I expected. Over two years, through some setbacks and an annoying amount of invoicing for freelance work, I muddled out a nice job, this site and a girl. As for that girl, I’m sitting in our new apartment right now.

We’re still in the process of setting up house. The pictures are leaning on the walls where they’ll someday hang. I’m living out of cardboard boxes and I still have to get my furniture from the old place, the one where I spent two years living with a stranger I met at a student film shoot.

It’s not a goodbye to my friend, just a goodbye to that time of my life. It was two years of roommate stuff, late-night talks and a dear friendship with the tiger-headed woman.

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