Camp Provincetown Interview
Provincetown doesn’t announce itself. It reveals itself—slowly, then all at once. For Sarah Kain, it happened in the 1970s, driving over the dunes with her mother, descending into town and recognizing something immediately:
I’m coming back here.
She did. And like most things in Provincetown, it didn’t happen through a plan—it happened through proximity, scraps, and permission.
Her first job was as a seamstress in a Commercial Street workshop, working with high-end fabrics—Italian wovens, imported textiles, materials that already carried a life of their own. One day, the manager told her she could take whatever scraps she wanted, as long as they weren’t too large.
That was enough.
Kain stitched them together.
Scarves, at first—improvised, assembled, built from what was left behind. She hung them on a fence outside Spiritus and started selling them directly to whoever passed by. It wasn’t strategy. It was instinct.
At some point, the owner of the boutique whose materials she had used called her:
“What happened?”
Kain didn’t see the problem. She had been told she could take the scraps. She made something from them. She sold them.
That was the system.
It still is.
Long before that system had a name, it had a place.
In the 1980s, Kain was selling hats and scarves at the PAAM Thanksgiving craft fair—part of the seasonal rhythm of Provincetown. Titi Yingling performed as a clown for the kids while Kain sold her work, handmade and immediate.
One of those pieces—a leather hat—was purchased by painter Anne Packard.
The line between artist and audience was already thin.
It got thinner.
At one point, Titi connected Kain with Genaro—Cookie Mueller’s husband—who was in town and looking for something specific: a hat with ear protection. He was tuned into Worlds End and Vivienne Westwood at the time, pulling from that same mix of fashion, subculture, and attitude.
Kain made the hat.
Then she made hats for everyone at 128 Commercial.
That’s how it spread.
Kain is self-taught, though not untrained. Her grandmother made her clothes when she was young, and she learned early that fabric carries memory. Later, as a student at Boston University studying French, she continued teaching herself—buying garments, taking them apart, copying them, rebuilding them.
That method never left.
“Textiles have history. They tell stories.”
For Kain, the material always comes first. Not concept. Not trend. Fabric.
That orientation has quietly positioned her ahead of the curve. While the fashion industry is now reckoning with sustainability, Kain has been working with recycled materials and organic textiles since the 1970s—not as a reaction, but as a way of working.
Berlin-sourced organic fabrics. African wax prints. Vintage T-shirts. Discarded garments.
Everything is source.
Everything is usable.
Her work exists in repetition and variation—wrap skirts, scarves, forms she returns to again and again. Not because they are fixed, but because they are open. Each piece shifts. Each one carries what came before it.
There is no clean separation between past and present. The material collapses that distance.
“Fast fashion is suffocating the earth.”
Her response isn’t to step away from fashion—but to rework it from the inside.
There are moments when the outside world intersects.
At Provincetown Fashion Weekend in 2018, Kain sold a dress to Princess Tatiana von Furstenberg. The encounter was pure Provincetown—immediate, informal, unstructured. A dress tried on behind a rack. A decision made in real time.
Kain followed up the only way she knew how—by hand-delivering a scarf to Diane von Furstenberg’s New York boutique.
No intermediary. No distance.
Now, on May 9 at the Red Room, Kain returns to the runway as part of Camp Provincetown’s Outsider program, NOT YOUR MOTHER’S RUNWAY.
Her focus is shifting toward:
- more unisex clothing
- more fluid forms
- more openness in how garments are worn
And the models?
Local. Real. Older.
“I want some geriatrics out there.”
It’s not a provocation. It’s a continuation.
Kain lives in Wellfleet now. She teaches French during the day. She plans trips to Cannes. She continues to build garments the same way she always has—through accumulation, intuition, and material.
When asked who she is when no one is watching, she answers without hesitation:
“Grandma Sarah.”
What she’s building isn’t just clothing.
It’s a way of working.
One that begins with what’s left behind,
moves through the body,
and returns to the world differently.
And that’s the bridge to the present.
What began as scraps on a fence, hats passed hand-to-hand, and materials moving through a community now returns to the runway—not as fashion in the traditional sense, but as continuation.
The same logic applies:
Take what exists.
Rework it.
Put it back into circulation.
MAY 9 — RED ROOM
What should we be paying attention to?
Organic fabrics.
Recycled materials.
What things are made of—and what happens to them after.
SARAH KAIN — making something new from what was never meant to be kept.
Tickets for Not Your Mother’s Runway are available now. Click here.
