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Everyday, Sirius Black would create an outfit and then write down the outfit in a special journal. This journal was a simple black moleskin journal charmed to never run out of pages that he had covered in doodles of silver ink. It was one of his most prized possessions. Nobody ever saw the inside of it.
Many had seen Sirius writing in this journal and wondered what he was writing. Some had asked, and were politely waved away, but most were too scared of the heir of the Ancient and Noble House of Black to ask. Eventually people stopped asking what he wrote and why he sometimes stuck pictures in the journal too.
Everyday, Sirius Black would write down what outfit he had created, and sometimes he would add in polaroids of the outfit or sketches that he had drawn beside the description too. Later, under the guise of being tired or having an assignment due, he would sneak off with this journal and a sketchbook with a pretty pencil, ink, and colored pencil. And then he would draw these outfits until they were perfectly his own. No longer would they be clothes from his closet, now they were his own designs. He would do this everyday, create new clothing and fashion lines, but he wouldn’t show anyone.
The first person he showed his designs to was actually Marlene McKinnon, and it was by accident. He had been sketching a new jacket when his pencil broke. He had to go find a sharpener Remus had given him and had forgotten to close his sketchbook. When he returned, Marlene was flipping through the designs with no hint of remorse or guilt for breaching his privacy.
“Hey!” He grabbed the book from her hands and cradled it to his chest, a glare settling heavily on his face. “What are you doing?”
“Those are good,” she said rather than answer. “They your designs?”
“...yeah,” he said after a while. “Why?”
“How would you feel about making your designs actual clothes?”
And thus was the beginning of a beautifully chaotic friendship. Since that day, Marlene and Sirius would meet up once a week on Sundays at two forty-five to work on making Sirius’s designs into actual clothes. Eventually, they would move the meetings to be whenever they could meet up, but by the time they were in their sixth year, they had created an entire line of clothes.
Lily Evans and Peter Pettigrew were their first victims. The two had been studying for a Muggle Studies quiz when Marlene and Sirius had begun their search for their friends. Without any warning, they had dragged the two away from their textbooks and into the Room of Requirement. They handed them clothes and told them to get changed. It took a few minutes and a lot of cursing zippers and buttons, but the two eventually stepped out from behind the changing curtains.
“This is cute,” Lily told the grinning duo, smoothing out the faint wrinkles in the charcoal grey skirt and pale blue crop top. “Where’d you get it?”
“We made it,” Sirius burst out, excitedly.
Peter’s jaw dropped with a pop. “How? These are so nice!”
Marlene explained how she had found Sirius’s ‘outfit of the day’ journal as she had taken to calling it and offered to help him bring his ideas to life. Now, nearly three years later, here they were.
Their next victims were James, Remus, Dorcas, and Mary. They actually explained what was happening that time at least, so the four didn’t think that something had blown up. Sirius and Marlene received many compliments and congratulations that day, enough that they had to sit down for a while in order for their egos to shrink a bit.
By the time they graduated, Sirius and Marlene’s line, called ‘School Variations,’ was in stores. Full of skirts and blouses, button ups and dress slacks, boots and flats, the line contained many school uniform-like pieces that could be substituted in for the traditional school uniform. The line (and the next two that Sirius and Marlene developed before 1981) was still in stores when Harry Potter went to school. (And if Minerva McGonagall and other professors who had taught the mischievous band of Gryffindors twenty years ago recognized the clothing or the ornate tag with little stars and guitars on it, none of them said anything.) (And if Remus wanted to simultaneously cry and laugh when he saw the same thing, that was his business.)