The designs of Paloma Soledad perfectly embody the steampunk aesthetic of the Portland underground. The materials for Soledad’s custom corsets and animé-inspired costumery seem to harken from a hundred years ago: lambskin, velvet, silk taffeta, steel spiral boning. Her expert construction of whimsically macabre costumes have earned her design positions with avante garde dance companies and the set of the meticulously-styled film Coraline.

Kristi Turnquist of The Oregonian recently gave the rundown on Paloma’s ideas on bloodthirsty pin-up girls and her early suspicions of nice people in the land of milk and honey…

Paloma Soledad
Age: 31
Hometown: Los Angeles; the family moved to Oahu, Hawaii, when she was 4

Experience: Graduated from the California Institute of the Arts; designed costumes for the movies “Cabin Fever” and “Hostel”; did costumes for the Portland dance troupe tEEth; worked in the costume department on the stop-motion animated feature “Coraline.”

Design visions: Soledad’s mother was a seamstress. “She would have me thread the elastic through her waistbands when I was little.” Youthful discovery of “Conan the Barbarian” and Alberto Vargas glamour-girl illustrations also formed her aesthetic. “It’s like a 1940s pin-up dancer — she’s going to dance on the table, and then jump down and slit your throat. We all have the power to be as sexy as we want to be.”

Signature pieces: Custom-made corsets, mixing sumptuous silks and velvets with leather and metal details, for a mix of masculine and feminine influences. “The boning is flexible, so you can eat in it, you can dance in it. It’s like a piece of art.”

Why Portland? “I was living in L.A., and the energy there’s so manic, it just makes you really crazy. My mom lives in Northern California, and she said, ‘You should check out Oregon.’ I moved here in 2006. When I first got here and people were nice to me, I thought, ‘What do you want from me?’ This is the land of milk and honey.”

Read more of Local Designers Take Over The Catwalk at OregonLive.com…