By Beth Hermann

Stepping into designer Brooke Priddy’s West Asheville studio, Ship to Shore, is like walking into your best friend’s living room. An antique sofa sits in the center of the front room where Priddy, 29, meets with her clients over a cup of hot tea. A crystal chandelier hangs from the ceiling and racks of dresses line the wall. A sweater-clad hound dog, Seymour, sniffs around during most consultations.

Priddy’s handmade clothing line, also called Ship to Shore, ranges from evening gowns and wedding dresses to lingerie and even baby onesies. But what sets Priddy apart is the fact that she uses mainly stretch fabrics. She works almost exclusively with high-quality, light to medium-weight fabrics like stretch denim, stretch linen and lycra—most with a hint of shine and the durability of a bathing suit, but without a trace of jazzercise. “A lot of people, when they think of stretch, they think of ‘80s leotards,” Priddy says. “It can look like that, but it doesn’t have to. That’s one thing I have to dispel quite often.”

Priddy literally sculpts each unique article of clothing onto the body of the client. She likes to work in earthtones but clients can choose their own colors, and she frequently dyes material herself, using everything from store-bought colors to wine, walnuts and tea. The result can be a flashy, form-fitting, floor-length Diana Ross number (like the dress Priddy designed for the Asheville Area Art Council’s Red Hot Ball in 2006) or a Victorian-looking, long-sleeved, knee-length dress that might be suitable for a tea party or a very proper date.

Priddy’s devotion to stretch fabrics has lost her clients. She doesn’t work with customer-supplied fabric or patterns. If someone insists on a fabric she doesn’t like, she will refer them to another designer with no hard feelings, she says. She meets with each prospective customer by appointment only. During the initial consultation, the customer describes preferences such as length, neckline and colors while Priddy sketches out the piece. The majority of her clients want a special dress for a special occasion. Even basic dresses start at $290 and run to $400.

Duane Dunston wanted to buy his friend, Melina Palumbo, a special gift before she moved away to Vermont, so he plunked down the cash for a session with Priddy. “I figured it was more unique than flowers,” he says. Palumbo chose a blue-green and cream patched dress with a wine-colored overlay in the halter-top style with an open back. After about an hour meeting in the boutique, Palumbo left with color swatches to match shoes and jewelry. She returned a few weeks later for the second stage, “draping,” in which Priddy pieced the material together onto Palumbo’s body. Water is Priddy’s main inspiration, and she says she models her clothing designs after the fluidity of the ocean. A few years ago, she bought an underwater lens for her camera and now photographs models wearing her clothes underwater for her catalog. “I prefer clothing that is flattering to the form and flows on the body,” Priddy says.

Her interest in clothing and sewing began early. She often wore handmade clothes as a child. After graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2000, Priddy moved to New York City with dreams of working in an art museum. Although she designed clothing for herself and close friends, she didn’t consider creating her own label. “I was repulsed by the fashion industry,” Priddy says. “I didn’t agree with the cutthroat, fast-paced environment.” Her plans changed abruptly when she met Elisa Jimenez, a New York City fashion designer who has worked with actors, musicians and film stars and was most recently seen on Project Runway in 2007. Priddy helped Jimenez backstage at her fashion shows and realized that she could do what she loved for a living without compromising her principles. Still, Priddy was struggling in Manhattan, living in the Washington Heights neighborhood (an hour train ride from downtown) and working several jobs to make ends meet. After visiting her parents’ home in Asheville in 2002, where she took a confidence-boosting entrepreneurship class at Mountain BizWorks, she decided to launch Ship to Shore in Western North Carolina. While she does most of her business in Asheville these days, she also sells wholesale to boutiques around the country. Mountain BizWorks’ Women’s Business Center recently voted her Entrepreneur of the Year.

Priddy has no regrets about leaving New York. “I can just jump on a plane and get back there anytime I want,” she says. But the multi-tasking she did there is the inspiration for her latest design, lingerie that works as a bathing-suit. When Priddy held down four different New York jobs at the same time, she often had to go from art gallery to the bar (she worked at both) to a date without time for a proper costume change. Clothing should be versatile, Priddy says, but overall, inspiring. “I want women to feel that if they want to strip off their clothes and jump in the ocean, they can do it,” she says.