The word treasure is layered with meaning, from pirate plunder to the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus is quoted as saying, “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Thankfully, Margaret Hatcher’s heart is firmly planted in Sonoma, where she has built up a treasure of artistic creations since moving here in 2001.
And now Margaret Hatcher has been proclaimed the 2025 Sonoma Treasure Artist, an honor bestowed by the Sonoma Cultural and Fine Arts Commission that will be celebrated at a wine and snack reception on April 4. The honor recognizes Hatcher’s wide-ranging contributions to art and artists in Sonoma Valley, noting her numerous contributions to the community, giving “freely of her time, talent, and encouragement to fellow artists, colleagues, and friends.” Hatcher, says the Commission’s declaration, “possesses a remarkable and inspiring talent, and passion and commitment to create art and openly share it, as well as her devotion to the community and city that moves her to continue to grow and contribute as an artist.”
Margaret Hatcher’s heart and creative energies have been woven (literally) into the fabric of Sonoma. The metaphor is timely since the annual Trashion Fashion Runway Show is fast approaching and Hatcher is both the mother and the mentor of that Sonoma Community Center signature event that challenges any and all to design recycled fashions from, essentially, trash.
“Trash really speaks to me as a way that we can at least slow down the flow to landfill,” She says. “It doesn’t fix all the problems, but it’s creating awareness as something we can do to help. And it’s free art supplies, it’s everywhere.”
Indeed. Trashion Fashion costumes employ every kind of trash, from pizza boxes and paper plates to tea bag wrappers, Capri Sun juice boxes, Gorilla tape, wilted vegetables, CD discs, foil coffee bags, garbage bags, candy wrappers, bubble wrap, video tape, egg cartons, magnolia leaves, wine corks, turkey inseminators, dialysis tubes and Sonoma Market price tags.
Trashion Fashion also introduced Sonoma and the Community Center to the annual, “Barbie, Kens and Friends Gallery and Auction,” which features endlessly imaginative, outrageous, whimsical, hilarious, amazing and wildly creative redesigned renditions of Barbie Dolls, and all her kin and kind. The redesigned dolls are all made (or made-over) by local artists, and exhibited in the Sonoma Community Center’s gallery – the majority of them dangling on threads from the ceiling – where the public is invited to view and bid on them.
Margaret confesses that Barbie was her first introduction to fashion at the age of seven when she got a Barbie doll as a girl in Modesto. Barbie, of course, has grown into a cultural icon, both revered and ridiculed by generations of girls, women, boys and men, some of whom go to great lengths to damage, destroy, burn, deconstruct, or – alternatively – revere, dress and redress, fantasize with and imitate her.
Margaret had a peripatetic childhood, moving to Southern California at nine, attending eighth grade in Cochabamba, Bolivia and her senior year of high school in Lima Peru. After high school she studied batik, weaving and jewelry making for six months in Mexico. She broadened her creative skills further at Cal State Fullerton, where she studied print making and photography. After that she learned pattern drafting at the Louise Salinger Academy of Fashion in San Francisco, the forerunner of the Art Institute of California. All along the way she was creating a skill set that, consciously or unconsciously, would lead her to Sonoma.
Her interests migrated toward costume design after “falling into” a job creating costumes for a South of Market musical production in San Francisco. Once she saw dancers “slithering across the floor” in costumes of her own creation, she says, “I was captured.”
It turned out that Margaret Hatcher is an extraordinary costume designer. She has created costumes for dance productions, shadow plays, a video game, fashion shows, gallery installations, parades and public events. As a maker, she employs a variety of techniques including sewing, pattern drafting, wig making, glove making, corset making, alter/upcycle shoes, beadwork and accessories. She can create armatures to support the shape, hold it up or hold it out. She is inspired by stuff to make costumes with. Thrift stores and the recycling bin provide her with a wealth of “stuff.”
In 2009 Margaret joined the staff of the Sonoma Community Center as Special Projects Manager, giving her a platform for unleashing ever more creative clothing. She retired in 2018.
Perhaps the most stunning, intricate and multidimensional work of her career gradually coalesced during the nine years she worked there, as, month-by-month she constructed a twelve-month calendar of the seasons, a series of studio photos featuring extraordinary costumes referencing the characteristics of each month. In one image, a woman dressed in plastic rain-drops, carrying a raindrop umbrella, strolls through an April shower shedding raindrops from her arms beneath a cloudy sky.
In another, a woman is dressed all in fall foliage, russet leaves blowing from her oak-leaf gown under a stiff breeze as she clutches a hand fan shaped like a leaf rake.
And in still another, an evil but lusty-looking witch rides a straw broom in a bat-winged gown with a spiderweb bodice against an orange Halloween sky. The limited edition calendars were released in 2022, but most of the jaw-dropping costumes are gone, recycled into other creative visions, largely because, well, where can you store such elaborate and delicate collections of art.
“The costumes are mostly gone after one use,” she says. “No one can wear these things. I ask myself, what am I going to do with them?”
If you want to see more photos of these amazing costumes, go to mhatchercostumes.com, and don’t let Google misdirect you to a website for costumes of a certain famous British prime minister. Margaret Hatcher did not invade the Falkland Islands and she is, fortunately for all of us, not dead.
The Treasure Artist celebration honoring Margaret Hatcher will be held at the Sonoma Community Center on Friday April 4 from 5 to 7 p.m. with wine, hors d ‘oeuvres, live music from Crème Brulee and the invitation (optional) to come in “costume-inspired attire.”
Well deserved. Congratulations, Margaret!