Standing at a waist-high, cork-topped assignment table in her West Main Artery architecture studio, Kim “Kylla” Dylla measures an arm’s breadth of white cilia and uses her teeth to abbreviate it from the spool. She pinches a arced bed-making aggravate amidst her silver-ringed forefinger and deride and slides the cilia through the needle’s attenuated eye afore application its point to attach a begrimed metal alternation to the chest abridged of a white denim vest.
A Siouxsie and the Banshees song emanates at low aggregate from a bluetooth apostle on the carpeted floor, assortment with the bendable circle and ballyhoo of a bed-making apparatus from the abutting room, breadth Dylla’s bed-making abettor (or “stichin’ vixen”), Loryn Awesome, assembles a brace of white and gold spandex trunks that Dylla advised to bout the vest.
Dylla, clad in brindled atramentous covering abate boots, atramentous angular jeans, a atramentous bandage catchbasin top and atramentous denim vest, works the aggravate through the denim and about the alternation with a active hand. It’s already division accomplished three in the afternoon, and she has about an hour afore she has to be in her car, en avenue to the column appointment on 29 North with the custom-built vest, trunks and analogous knee pads, which will be alien brief to California to able wrestler Will “WillPower” Hobbs.
As far as embellishments go, chains are attainable to add to a garment, Dylla explains as she stitches; the aforementioned goes for patches (Hobbs requested a application of his hashtag, #willpower, be stitched beyond the rear of his angry trunks). Things like bones, bullets, spikes and studs are added difficult to apply, Dylla says, but she’s accomplished at those, too.
In fact, she’s added accomplished with beating studs into afflicted covering than she is bond brownish spandex, because for years, the 34-year-old has been authoritative custom date abrasion for some of the world’s best acclaimed heavy-metal musicians, amidst them Apparatus Head, Cradle of Filth, King Diamond, Kreator and Nita Strauss, guitarist for Alice Cooper and Femme Fatale.
She’s additionally advised for added mainstream, non-metal rockers like Arnel Pineda of Journey and Amos Heller, a Charlottesville built-in who plays bass in Taylor Swift’s band. And Hobbs isn’t Dylla’s alone angry client—she makes access apparel and arena abrasion for an armory of Apple Angry Entertainment performers, too.
“The ability of apparel and appearance is transformative,” says Dylla. “When you put on a costume, or aback you put on that allotment of accouterment that absolutely makes you feel like a star, it transforms you not alone in the eyes of the bodies that you are assuming for, but internally, it gives you confidence.” Aback addition block a Kylla Custom Bedrock Abrasion anorak over his shoulders, she hopes he feels like a bedrock star, whether he’s walking to the abundance for a loaf of aliment or acrimonious up an axe to atom for bags of headbangers. “That’s what I accept to accord people,” she says.
Before Dylla advised clothes for heavy-metal heavyweights, she listened to their music. As a boyhood in the Hampton Roads area, Dylla and her accompany went to goth and automated clubs. Through that scene, Dylla says she became “obsessed with award underground music. It was consistently about award the affair no one had listened to before, that articulate added abundant and added evil.”
The heaviest, best evil-sounding being she begin while trading tapes with added metalheads was Norwegian atramentous metal, with its satanic- and pagan-themed lyrics growled over the complete of heavily adulterated guitars, music that “sounded like it was recorded on a four-track in a basement in Oslo.”
“I admired it,” Dylla says, grinning. “I aloof jumped into the abysmal end of metal stuff; I didn’t accept any aperture bands.”
Eventually, though, she got into added types of metal—regular old abundant metal, batter metal, doom metal—and started alert to Iron Maiden, her admired bandage of all time. Metal is a alcove scene, but its admirers are amidst the best committed out there. “Like, no one’s aloof accidentally into Slayer,” Dylla says.
But there’s acceptable acumen for it: Metal is a adequately abstruse genre. Metal musicians are generally virtuoso players who compose structurally complicated songs played fast and in abnormal time signatures. What’s more, the songs generally abide in a belief that the bandage has created for itself. Metal isn’t aloof music to accept to—it’s a apple to footfall into.
Not continued afterwards Dylla started alert to metal, she got into assuming it. Classical articulation acquaint accomplished her how to ascendancy and appropriately use her diaphragm while singing, and while alert to bands like Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse and Obituary in her car, she experimented with articulate techniques and sounds until she ample out that if she acclimated her diaphragm to advance air through a “sort of whisper” in her throat, what came out of her aperture was a dark, age-old growl.
Dylla started authoritative her own clothes aback she was a teen, too. A self-described “classic goth kid,” she couldn’t acquisition clothes she liked, and what she did like, she couldn’t afford. So she fabricated her own, usually out of repurposed absolute from clothes she begin in austerity stores. Dylla’s mother accomplished her to sew aback she was young, but the aboriginal allotment Dylla patterned, cut and sewed on her own—with some advice from a friend’s beforehand sister—was a corset. Corsets, with their panels, boning, laces (or buckles) and specific measurements, are awfully difficult to make, but commutual the arduous apparel set Dylla on an attainable aisle to design, arrangement and sew aloof about annihilation she wanted.
After admission from UVA in 2005 with degrees in computer science and art, Dylla formed on the Rome Reborn action through UVA’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. At night, she sang (and screamed) in Thismeansyou, the jewel of Charlottesville’s metal arena at the time.
Dylla wore her own designs on stage, and at some point, Joey Jordison of Slipknot adopted one of Dylla’s jackets to abrasion on date for a Rob Zombie show. He wore it afresh for an awards show, and, anon after, Dylla’s buzz started to ring: Had she fabricated that air-conditioned anorak Jordison wore, and would she accomplish another?
She fabricated another, and another, and another, and anon enough, aback she wasn’t at assignment or singing with Thismeansyou, she was scouring bounded best and austerity food for covering and denim apparel to repurpose into jackets and vests for adolescent metalheads. Application recycled and reclaimed fabrics not alone apparel the adamantine bedrock world’s torn-and-worn aesthetic; it helps Dylla accumulate costs bottomward for her barter who, admitting about fame, don’t accept a lot of banknote to bead on a date apparel (Dylla, who’s been a touring artist herself, knows this firsthand).
In 2012, she clearly founded Kylla Custom Bedrock Wear, and while she admired her job in the agenda cultural ancestry field, she loves metal. And she wondered: How abounding $350 jackets would she accept to accomplish a anniversary to according her bacon additional bloom insurance? “The acknowledgment was like, three,” she says.
So she abdicate her job at UVA and got to assignment on her two-month adjustment backlog, sketching, acerbic and bond in the workspace she’d set up at home, or on the alley as she toured with her added bands, including Kung Fu Dykes and Richmond-based shock rockers GWAR (Dylla embodied the Vulvatron character, singing and spraying the admirers with affected claret spewed from prosthetic breasts, from abatement 2014 to bounce 2015).
Dylla can, and will, sew aloof about anywhere (sewing machines are added carriageable than you’d think, she says). She’ll booty her clients’ abstracts on bout buses and backstage, or accomplish ringside alterations. She’ll assemblage alley cases into makeshift bed-making tables, or antithesis her apparatus on whatever flat-ish apparent is available. Dylla frequently campaign all over the mid-Atlantic to accommodated audience at their gigs, and she goes to Europe best summers to bolt a cord of metal festivals, or alike comedy a appearance actuality and there.
In the attenuate moments aback Dylla’s not working, she sings in Fulton Ave., a Charlottesville-based consecutive killer-themed afterlife metal band, alongside bagman Jordan Marchni, bassist and ambassador J.J. Williams and guitarists Drew Curtis and Justin Melton. Named for a artery in Poughkeepsie, New York, breadth in the 1990s a man murdered a cardinal of women, best of them prostitutes, Fulton Ave.’s beyond-obscene songs with titles like “Break Your Fuckin’ Face” are loud, fast and adapted and complete like a razor-wheeled ammo alternation barreling bottomward the tracks…there’s article animating about the attainable crisis of it. “This is your aftermost adventitious to alpha a mosh pit,” Dylla told the army afore Fulton Ave. bankrupt out a contempo gig at The Ante Room. One mohawked fan did absolutely that, and Dylla couldn’t advice but smile aback three or four others abutting in the thrash.
Dylla additionally sings in atramentous metal bandage A Winter Lost and has played keyboards and articulate on bout with electro-industrial bandage Velvet Acerbic Christ. She contributed bedfellow vocals to Accouchement of Bodom’s best contempo album, I Worship Chaos, and finds a bit of time to travel. “Sleep is secondary,” Dylla says. “I don’t accept children. I don’t accept pets, and I don’t beddy-bye [much]…except for Sundays.”
This accomplished summer, Dylla set up her apparatus backstage at a metal anniversary in Slovenia, breadth she had a appearance of some ballsy axial European mountains while bed-making bedrock ‘n’ cycle clothes. As she worked, she says couldn’t advice but think, “this job is cool,” and in abandoning that moment, a attending of according genitalia satisfaction, contentment and acknowledgment spreads beyond her face.
In June, Dylla confused the Kylla Custom Bedrock Abrasion operation to its accepted area on the additional attic of the Starr Hill architecture at 801 W. Main St. Dylla went to a agglomeration of shows in this absolute space, aback back it was the Starr Hill Music Hall (the area bankrupt in 2007), and she thinks generally of how “it’s absolutely neat” to accomplish clothes for world-class bedrock stars in a abode that’s so angry to the Charlottesville music scene. The alone added adapted atom in boondocks would be if Trax (the bistro that hosted some of the Dave Matthews Band’s ancient shows, and a atom played by Juliana Hatfield, Sonic Youth and They Ability Be Giants, amidst others) was still standing.
The two-room flat is abounding with assorted accouterment racks afraid with covering and denim jackets and jeans, additional a bubble of spandex fabrics that dabble on tables and a atramentous and white paisley bed-making board. One allowance is lined with about a dozen bed-making machines on tables—old atramentous metal Singers, a white Pfaff machine, a serger and a Sailrite apparatus that’s advised to sew canvas baiter sails and can aggravate through aloof about annihilation (including fingers, so Dylla and Awesome assignment carefully).
Near the door, adolescent and breeze presses sit aloft a babyish desk, its top drawer abounding of assorted sizes and hues of metal grommets and snaps. There are babyish crates and big artificial accouterment boxes abounding of embellishments such as studs, spikes, snaps, chains, alternation mail, patches and spools of assorted bolt trim; atramentous bolt bins on a metal shelving assemblage authority bolt dye, Simplicity dress patterns, netting, thrifted alloyed belts and added supplies. In one window, there’s a red-spiked delicious bulb sandwiched amidst a brushed metal K and a barbarian clock. Amidst the decorations blind on the walls are pictures of some Kylla Custom Bedrock Abrasion clients, like Robb Flynn of Apparatus Head, WWE action abstracts cutting Kylla designs, an Iron Maiden banderole and a Kylla Custom Bedrock Abrasion banderole that bears the company’s motto: Bedrock your wardrobe. Bedrock your life.
Pairs of shears and a babyish army of pincushions—the archetypal red amazon ones, additional a ample atramentous bat one—stuck with yellow-headed pins blow on aloof about every surface. Measuring tapes of assorted colors adhere from the accouterment racks and snake about accouterment sketches on the bed-making table. A few altered dress forms, additional a brace of beige-colored artificial legs that Dylla has dubbed Larry “The Legs” Malone, angle at the beginning amidst the two rooms.
Dylla says that aback she aboriginal started authoritative bedrock wear, she formed about alone in black, amber and Army blooming fabrics, application a straight-sew apparatus and atramentous thread. Now that about 50 percent of her assignment is for wrestlers (and the casual French metal bandage that requests neon bobcat book pants) she’s alive with a bubble of spandex fabrics and threads.
“It array of offends my goth sensibilities,” Dylla jokes as she sews a white and gold kneepad awning for Hobbs’ angry costume, attractive over her accept and comatose against hot pink, atramentous and azure ribbon-cut spandex. Afterwards authoritative a blatant blooming cape with accoutrement for a wrestler, she begin beam and chiffon calamus vanes all over the flat for months afterward. She gets it, though—she herself was a wrestler with Richmond’s Lucha Libre for a while.
But Dylla’s still a metalhead through and through. One night, she ability host three touring metal bands at her abode (the all-around metal arena is almost abutting and hospitable) and baker them breakfast in the morning afore branch to work, breadth she’ll sew until it’s time to see Swedish guitar virtuoso Yngwie Malmsteen cook faces at The Jefferson Theater, or time to comedy a set with Fulton Ave.
Making date and achievement clothes is radically altered from authoritative artery clothes, Dylla says. Best of us aren’t jumping and bouncing off angry arena ropes on a approved basis, and she considers action as abundant as artful aback creating a piece.
Dylla consistently consults with audience afore designing, allurement them what they’re attractive for. She’ll ask them for examples of what they like and don’t like, what fabrics, colors and embellishments they want, and calm they’ll accede on a architecture that apparel their on-stage persona.
For her angry clients, she thinks about what a allotment will attending like aback the wrestler makes his or her access into the ring, and afresh how it will both attending and action during a match. The bolt and the architecture of a apparel charge be adjustable and non-restrictive; embellishments like spikes and aloft studs can be alarming for concrete matches, so Dylla tends to abstain them aback designing for wrestlers.
Joseph Rudd, accepted to best as WWE SmackDown wrestler Erick Rowan, says Dylla helps him accompany his “crazy account to fabric.” Dylla has fabricated a few items for his character, including a brace of patched pants and a brownish-green military-meets-sanatorium vest. (For the record, Rudd is 6 feet, 8 inches and about 315 pounds.) Rudd says Dylla’s apparel are “durable and [hold] up to the best batty of matches.”
She’s advised things like a acrylic accessory covered in faces for WWE Raw brilliant Bray Wyatt (yes, it’s as creepy-looking as it sounds), and affluence of access and arena apparel for Tamina Snuka, a WWE SmackDown “diva.”
One of the bigger challenges Dylla faces aback designing for wrestlers is the bulk of, or rather the abridgement of, absolute architecture amplitude on angry singlets and trunks (or “manties,” as Dylla calls them). “You’re not absolutely alive with abundant bolt there,” Dylla quips, adopting an eyebrow.
Musicians accomplish beneath hot, ablaze lights, so their accouterment charge be as failing as possible. Covering and metal aren’t agile materials, which is why Dylla avoids abacus pockets and linings to bedrock abrasion that has to additionally be athletic abundant to bear (fake) blood, diaphoresis and whatever abroad gets flung about at a metal show. All Kylla Custom Bedrock Abrasion apparel are triple-stitched to anticipate bond blowouts—high-kicking drummers and amp-leaping guitarists tend to breach the crotches of their jeans, Dylla says.
When designing for musicians, Dylla additionally translates what she hears in the music into the clothing.
“My painting abecedary [at UVA] accomplished me to never use atramentous out of the tube—you consistently accept to mix your own black,” says Dylla. “So I feel like to dye things and acrylic things atramentous so that there’s a bit of purple, a bit of brown, a bit of dejected in it…it’s [more] interesting. You can accomplish atramentous a spectrum,” she says, abacus afterwards a pause: “That’s metal.”
A brace of years ago, she advised the date apparel for Danish abundant metal accouterments King Diamond’s 2015 Abigail tour, breadth the bandage played its acclaimed 1987 abstraction album, Abigail, in its entirety.
Dylla best up a vinyl archetype of Abigail from the acclimated bins at Plan 9 in Charlottesville, not continued afterwards starting at UVA. She’d gotten into the addiction of lighting candles about the almanac amateur and aloof sitting with the music, as albums “provided the best company,” she says.
As is the case with all genres of music, abundant metal (or aloof “metal”) has affluence of subgenres. If you’re not familiar, here’s a blast advance to accord you a bigger handle on the Kylla Custom Bedrock Abrasion world.
Metal/heavy metal: Rooted in consciousness-expanding acerbic bedrock and blues-rock and employing heavily adulterated sounds, the brand was developed in the United Kingdom in the 1960s and ’70s (think Led Zeppelin, Atramentous Sabbath, Abysmal Purple).
Thrash metal: A faster, added advancing subgenre of metal (Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer).
Death metal: Characterized by low- tuned, adulterated guitars, brusque bounce and key changes, additional glottal vocals and generally Lovecraftian, abhorrence film-esque lyrics about the occult, religion, afterlife and murder, amidst added things (Venom, Obituary, Kreator).
Black metal: Perhaps the best underground and atomic attainable of the metal subgenres, it’s an alike darker brood of afterlife metal (Mercyful Fate, Mayhem).
Doom metal: Doom musicians apathetic things down, employing added blue sounds and tempos than musicians in added metal subgenres (Saint Vitus, Candlemass).
Speed metal: Technically fast, advancing metal that requires able skill.
Power metal: Similar to acceleration metal, but added symphonic in nature.
Abigail is a abstraction anthology about a adolescent 19th-century brace whose lives are angry upside bottomward by Abigail, the angry spirit of a babyish stillborn decades earlier. “The lyrics are like some array of Lovecraftian epic, abounding of angry and mystery, but with an old book to them,” says Dylla. The music is aerial and epic, but still headbangable, and the all-embracing adventure is atrocious and adorable but abounding of the complexities of animal existence. This is what she put into the band’s wardrobe, apparel that she says were archetypal metal looks, “like they crept out of a grave they had been active in back the anthology had been released, but surfacing with an bend that speaks to all ancestors of metal fans.”
Andy LaRocque, guitarist, songwriter and casual synthesizer amateur for King Diamond, says it was a “pleasure” to assignment with Dylla on the costumes. “She absolutely accepted our needs, and her eye for capacity aloof fabricated it perfect; she alike came out to our rehearsals [in Texas] to fix the aftermost details,” he says, abacus that they plan to argue with her afresh on approaching tours.
Dylla says she doesn’t get starstruck anymore, but she “can’t abjure it’s absolutely air-conditioned aback you angle on [the ancillary of a] date in advanced of bags of bodies and watch a bandage that you’ve admired for years and watch them comedy in your clothes.”
“It’s consistently been adamantine for me to put into words what is in my arch aback I accept to music, but with this job, I get a adventitious to put it into cloth,” Dylla says.
Dylla’s acceptability as a thoughtful, artistic and reliable achievement accouterment artist has advance mostly organically from artist to musician, but occasionally acknowledgment to the internet. Sean Gronholt, guitarist for Northern Virginia-based goth metal bandage Novarium, ordered a brace of pants and a anorak from Dylla afterwards award Kylla Custom Bedrock Abrasion at the top of Google chase after-effects for “rock wear” and “stage clothing.” Gronholt had a acceptable abstraction of what he was attractive for, so he beatific Dylla some examples and let her run with it.
“Besides accepting an absorbing portfolio of accomplished work, Kim is a metalhead through [and through], and I knew her faculty of aesthetics was absolute for what I needed,” Gronholt says. Aback cutting his custom pieces, he says he feels “like a character, a larger-than-life bedrock brilliant and all-around badass.”
When Gronholt showed up for a Novarium set cutting his Kylla Custom Bedrock Abrasion outfit, his bandmate and adolescent guitarist Dean Michaels had to accept one, too. Michaels ordered a custom anorak and pants, and based his appeal on added items Dylla had already made, with a twist: She congenital a Celtic architecture into the pants to represent Michaels’ Irish heritage. Dylla’s “reputation in the industry, her chump account and her handmade, one-of-a-kind pieces with such absorption to detail accomplish her the absolute artist of the affectionate of attending I was activity for,” Michaels says.
There are a few added association in the industry who do what Dylla does. Michaels says he’s announced to them, but “none of the pieces appear abutting to the akin of detail that Kylla Custom Bedrock Abrasion does. Added companies agitate out multiples of the aforementioned pieces. Addition abroad walks about cutting the aforementioned accouterments as you somewhere. Kim’s pieces are one of a kind. Kim [even] refuses to accomplish article for addition that she’s already made,” Michaels says.
It’s about 4pm aback Dylla and Awesome accomplishment up wrestler Hobbs’ custom order, and Dylla takes the absolute getup—trunks, hooded belong and kneepad covers—into the cutting/patterning/photographing/mailing allowance and pulls the belong over a chest anatomy and clips the trunks and kneepad covers assimilate hangers for a quick photo. Next, she folds the alone apparel and stuffs them into two USPS Priority Mail Express packets forth with a acknowledge you agenda and custom affliction instructions for how to ablution aggregate in a auberge bathtub or barter stop sink. Dylla tapes the two packets calm and weighs the accomplished affair on a mail scale—2.7 pounds—before bushing out the online aircraft forms and press a characterization to affix to the advanced of the taped-up packet.
At 4:25, Dylla rushes bottomward the stairs and out to the parking lot, Hobbs’ bindle in hand, and hops into her little atramentous Pontiac with a KYLLA authorization plate. She knows that if she doesn’t leave by 4:30, she won’t accomplish it to the column appointment in time. Dylla says that best days, the column appointment advisers are continuing at the board attractive at their watches, cat-and-mouse for her to run in at the aftermost minute with a amalgamation to address to some accidental abode in Sweden, Norway, Japan or Australia.
After the column appointment run, Dylla will acknowledgment to her flat and assignment backward into the night, sipping cans of Wegmans blackberry tangerine-flavored seltzer baptize as she works. Alike with Awesome bed-making in the flat three or four canicule a week, Dylla still works about 12 hours a day, six canicule a week. She tries to sew for eight hours a day, which can be catchy aback she’s administration all the added aspects of the business—money, books and shipping, architecture consults, patterning, affairs and dyeing and alleviative materials. If you canyon the Starr Hill architecture at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning and see a ablaze on on the additional floor, affairs are it’s Dylla, alive abroad amidst the circle of the machines and abundant metal screams alive from the bluetooth speaker.
