From The Pitch Kansas City
September 2008

It’s a hot weekday afternoon, but Carman Stalker looks cool and chic. She’s sporting a dark-green embroidered lingerie-style top over jeans, and her dark-caramel-colored hair with blond streaks is partly pulled back. The 34-year-old runs WearHaus, a monthly fashion market. On the first Thursday of every month, she recruits a rotating roster of local designers to sell their creations at the Velvet Dog. In October, she’s teaming up with Haute Market to sponsor a Week of Fashion.

“I’ve always been interested in fashion,” Stalker says. “That’s the only reason I ever made it to high school every day — so I could show off my outfit.” She grew up in Independence and graduated from Truman High School. After getting her degree in communication studies (with an emphasis in PR and marketing) from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, she went to Chicago to work as an event planner for an entertainment company. A couple of years later, she moved to San Diego.

She had trouble finding a PR job in California, though, so she started making and selling handbags. Soon she began to realize that artists and designers didn’t know how to promote themselves. Having planned events in Chicago, she knew how to put on a show. “A little show turned into a big show turned into a bigger show, and that’s pretty much how WearHaus started,” she says.

But she still had trouble finding a job, and San Diego wasn’t the cheapest place to struggle. Then her father died. That’s when she realized that she didn’t want to be so far away from her family. Plus, Kansas City had changed while she was gone — the Crossroads was growing and all sorts of arty events had popped up — and she felt like she was missing out on a renaissance in her hometown. At the end of 2004, she moved back and started the KC version of WearHaus.

Word spread about her new venture. Soon people started contacting her. She now has almost 300 people signed up as designers. She attributes this to KC’s small-town habit of spreading news fast.

“It’s always the question when you’re in a meeting or you’re talking about somebody: ‘Oh, you know so-and-so? Yeah, she’s friends with …’ and you end up realizing how small Kansas City is.”

In July, Stalker went to an art show at Fringe Fest. She was walking around and started talking to a couple of the artists. They asked her name.

“Oh, I’m Carman,” she told them.

“Carman Stalker? You’re with WearHaus, right?” they replied.

“It’s like you’re like a celebrity in Mayberry or something,” she says. “It’s kind of nice — it feels good that people recognize and appreciate and support the people who are actually trying to do something good for the city.”

Stalker says she recently met with Jeff Fortier of Mammoth Productions, a music-promotion company, and they talked about things they want to do so that Kansas City will be recognized as a cool place to live.

“If all those people who have that vision start aligning themselves and start working together, it could maybe become more of a big city and less of a small town,” she says. She says she has seen a slow convergence toward that goal from different artists and designers around town. “Once we do that, the shit’s going to hit the fan. In a good way.”