Back at the Ranch
“I had my arm up a cow’s vagina,” says ex-Heatherette designer Traver Rains. The man known for mingling with the likes of Pam Anderson and Lydia Hearst, both of whom have strutted down Heatherette’s raucous, spectacle-strewn catwalk, isn’t the first guy you’d likely call when needing to birth a calf. But he probably should be.
As it turns out, the designer is a third-generation rancher who spent his childhood doing just that on his family’s sprawling Montana compound. The closest town had, maybe, 100 people. And Rains, or so he says, would sometimes go days without seeing a member of the outside world.
But now, two years after he and partner Richie Rich dissolved the New York-based label best known for glittery, party-fueled frocks that invoked visions of ecstasy and glow sticks, Rains is ready for a new foray in L.A.: Photography. And his inaugural exhibit pays homage to his one-time home underneath the big sky.
“We literally spent a year running around with Dave LaChapelle on set,” the designer explains of his behind-the-lens education, a clear perk from his days with Heatherette. “Also the fashion shows are basically set up for a giant photo shoot using 50 girls. At the end of the day, they’re at the end of the runway posing.”
And few people know how to put on a better show than Rains. Heatherette events were flash and trash at its finest — confetti-filled dance parties known for attracting porn stars, drag queens and every Hilton sister in between. Richie Rich would receive his applause wearing roller skates; assless leather chaps passed for menswear.
Though more subdued at first glance, the images in Rains' Montana-inspired passion project have the same elaborate undertones.
One photo featuring an Americana-clad barn and two horses in red and blue appears to be colored with Photoshop. Not so, says the designer.
“It hadn’t been used in years,” Raines says of the barn, built sometime between 1850 and 1910. “So I painted it.” At the same time, a friend dyed the horses by hand – a move causing a curious reporter to wonder how PETA hadn’t yet staged a sit-in.
“Oh they’re fine,” Rains assures of the animals. “They have kids that ride them so they’re used to being tortured.”
As for the conceptual, editorial-quality outfits used in each shot, each was built by hand using materials such as paper, feathers, tulle, sequins, shingle siding and rusty barbed wire found in his grandfather’s shed. He designed and built each headpiece, too. The shoes were mostly Moschino.
Props and locations on the Montana shoot — which spanned two visits lasting multiple weeks each — included actual cowboys, a just-born calf, a Gold Rush-era stagecoach stop and a former eagle’s nest. One photo features Raines’ tiny, wrinkled granny who still carries a rifle in her car. Brother Matt, a former soldier, built each picture’s massive, raw-wood frame.
And now that Rains is expelling some of the excess creativity he came to L.A. to find in the first place, he is slowly creeping back toward fashion with a new line of photography-inspired T-shirts making their market debut at the MAGIC trade show in Las Vegas this week. But momentary goals are more about being behind the lens instead of behind a sewing machine.
Judging by the packed crowd at the exhibit’s launch party two weeks ago (Alan Cumming and Aubrey O’Day were among the famous friends that flocked to Rains' Hollywood studio, lovingly dubbed The Ranch), he doesn’t need to shelve his dreams just yet.
Asked if he misses the former business he built from the ground up and the jet set lifestyle it once encompassed, the real life cowboy hesitates with thought. “I do. It was a lot of pressure and it’s been very relaxed in the last couple of years,” he says with a slight drawl. “The thing I do miss are the opportunities we had to travel. We had shows everywhere – Tokyo, Russia. And photoshoots.”
Perhaps it’s time for another runway after all. The photographer smiles.
“I do love a good show.”
