Sarie Gessner—known for her Western-inspired suits, custom embroidery, and passion for music—is dressing some of country and Americana’s brightest stars for the stage.

Seated at her Singer sewing machine, Sarie Gessner, 31, feeds a cream-colored, snap-button shirt under the needle, steering the fabric through steep curves and subtle bends as she chain-stitches a design of black petals and green vines. She controls the speed with a wooden crank under the sewing table. Chain stitch is Gessner’s preferred technique for embroidery; she uses it to sew everything from a petite Joshua tree on a sleeve to full custom suiting.

Throughout American and music history, handmade clothes have cycled through status phases as objects of necessity, scorn, or pride. But currently, in an era of Amazon, mass production, and fast fashion, one-of-a-kind and vintage items are in demand. The timing couldn’t be better for Gessner, who has parlayed her love of sewing, and Western swing and country music—along with a devotee’s knowledge of vintage fashions—into a thriving business.

She’s capable of listening to music and then seeing how to ‘dress it,’ in a way that a lot of tailors wouldn’t.”

Three end-to-end sewing machines line one wall of Gessner’s Nashville studio: a Singer featherweight, which she uses for straight stitch and backstitch, her Singer chain stitch rig, and a modern industrial Juki machine for heavy lifting. Above these hang a custom “Jukebox Mama” neon sign, a cluster of posters, and two pegboards offering rainbow-ordered rows of thread close at hand. Elsewhere, the studio is a tidy mixture of form and function: concert and pop-culture posters, vintage ads, music memorabilia, piles of fabric, four measuring tapes suspended from gold hooks, and a rhinestone stud setter, which resembles a single-hole punch.

Amid the double-rack of Gessner’s current projects hang several pearl-snap shirts embroidered in roses and vines; flared miniskirts with bulbous belt loops and curved pockets at the hip; and his-and-hers wedding jean jackets, each with a desert-scene tapestry chain-stitched across the back. Her designs cost anywhere from $25 for small chain stitch work (like a name or a flower), up to $5,000 or even $10,000 for fully decked-out, handmade suits. Recently, she completed a pair of diaphanous, iridescent wings to match a bodysuit she designed for singer-songwriter Sierra Ferrell, as well as a tomato-red dress for country singer Emily Nenni. While she works, Gessner plays music by the artists she designs for from a miniature Bluetooth speaker.

“She’s capable of listening to music and then seeing how to ‘dress it,’ in a way that a lot of tailors wouldn’t,” says folk musician Willi Carlisle.

For Carlisle, Gessner designed a suit coat and two shirts in a style he dubs “teacher core”: fanciful plaid and polka-dot tulips sprout from chain-stitched daisy stems on the yoke of a brown suit coat; tiny crimson hearts are scattered over a denim shirt collar; big patchwork and embroidery flowers adorn the chest of another shirt.

Whenever musicians step onstage and into character, their costumes are part of the experience for the audience—and sometimes, they become iconic: Willie Nelson’s comfortable t-shirts and signature red bandana signal to audiences that he is no rhinestone cowboy; Johnny Cash was literally the “Man in Black.”

“My whole thing with outfits… it’s always a suit of armor; you put your armor on when you’re ready to get on stage,” says Ray Benson, frontman of the legendary Western swing band Asleep at the Wheel.

It’s like, when your song comes on—you know that feeling, when your song comes on?— you just have to get out on the dance floor.”

Gessner grew up in Rockford, Illinois, where her grandmother taught her to sew, and her parents played Chicago Blues, jazz, and swing music on the stereo. As a young child, she learned to stitch doll clothes by hand before graduating to a vintage Singer sewing machine. By the time she got to high school, Gessner was making her own clothes—rockabilly dresses and ‘50s-inspired circle skirts—and swing dancing for fun. Much like the musicians she designs for today, Gessner wore her own, unique designs as a way to control her narrative: “If I was wearing something outlandish, that’s what they’d be noticing, not anything I might be insecure about,” she says.

After high school, Gessner studied theater design at Emerson College before moving, in 2015, to Austin, Texas, where she fell in love with the city’s honky tonk music and dance scene. Enamored of the Austin aesthetic, which continued to inspire her even after she moved briefly to Los Angeles, Gessner bought a chain stitch machine and taught herself to sew flowers onto Western shirts.

In 2019, she moved again, this time to Nashville, Tennessee, to apprentice for Manuel Cuevas, perhaps the best-known living designer of custom Western suiting. While stuck at home during early Covid-19 lockdowns, Gessner began designing more Western wear in her own style, building a client base through Instagram and the music community. Business took off quickly, and Gessner named her operation “Jukebox Mama” after two homonymous songs.

“As a fan of music, and someone who likes being out and about dancing, it’s like, when your song comes on—you know that feeling, when your song comes on?— you just have to get out on the dance floor,” she says.

Western-inspired clothing is rooted in working cowboy culture: John B. Stetson’s now-eponymous hat, which he first sold at his shop in the late 1800s, was inspired by Mexican vaquero headwear; Levi Strauss’ riveted denim pants took off in the same era, when miners and cowboys discovered they made durable workwear. Rodeo riders still favor pearl-snap shirts to this day, because they unsnap rather than catching if the rider’s thrown in the ring.

Stage wear, like any fashion niche, goes through eras. Western-style clothing took a more glamorous turn in the 1940s, when Nudie Cohn started designing the glitzy, elaborately embroidered and rhinestoned suits that would become his signature—suits later made famous by Hank Williams, Gram Parsons, and Elvis. (Many of the suits Gessner works on are Nudie-inspired, but, much as there are rigid designations for real champagne, she and many other designers consider only suits made in the House of Nudie to be the genuine article.)

By the early 1970s, when Asleep at the Wheel started out, most country bands wore matching polyester uniforms. Throwing back to embroidered, Nudie-inspired Western wear, the band quickly perfected a stage look of hats, jackets, jeans, and boots.

“We were the first band to do that,” Benson says. “We set the standard—I’m not overreaching by saying this.”

In 1975, Nudie Cohn’s head tailor, Manuel Cuevas, opened his own shop, and in the following years, his designs helped shift Western wear back onto the country stage. And the popular movie “Urban Cowboy,” released in 1980, stoked a more widespread return to Western fashions.

Today, Western wear is everywhere again, from the cover of Beyoncé’s new album, “Cowboy Carter,” to Brooklyn street style. Even Ken, played by Ryan Gosling in the “Barbie” movie, sports a pearl-snap Western shirt. And while popular cowboy iconography has long focused on straight white men—from John Wayne to the TV cowboys in the popular series “Yellowstone”—the stories of cowboys of color, like Nat Love and Bass Reeves, have become better known recently. Parts of Queer culture, too, have embraced cowboy fashion this time around.

“The outfits in the cowboy aesthetic are incredibly fun for self-expression,” Gessner says. “I definitely want to make sure that my designs are for everybody, regardless of gender or size.”

Musicians often ask Gessner to design clothes for their momentous occasions: weddings, album cover photoshoots, and Grand Ole Opry debuts. For country singer Melissa Carper’s Opry debut, Gessner embroidered a full suit for Carper and a tan, suede skirt set for her girlfriend (and sometimes-fiddle player), Rebecca Patek.

Carper, who sings vintage-tinged, bluesy, country music and plays upright bass, typically wears men’s polyester dress pants, pearl-snap shirts, and fitted vests on stage. But for her Opry debut, she wanted something extra special. Onto brown corduroy, Gessner chain-stitched yellow Arkansas tickseed flowers from Carper’s home state, and orange Monarch butterflies—her mother’s favorite. She topped it off with a little sparkle: Carper’s first rhinestones.

“I knew that if I was gonna go out on the Opry stage, I really wanted to go all out,” says Carper, who was terrified to appear on country music’s most storied stage. “[The suit Gessner embroidered] gave me a lot more confidence, like ‘Yeah, I belong here. Look, I’m wearing a suit.’”