Though she didn’t subscribe to HBO prior to August of this year, Marianne Fairbanks of Rogers City had a solid reason for finally doing so. She wanted to tune into a certain episode of the HBO miniseries, “Sharp Objects,” that featured 37 vintage dresses she and her staff at Recollections had created for the show.

The eight-part series, a psychological thriller based on Gillian Flynn’s debut novel of the same name, included an episode that required female cast members to wear Civil War-era gowns and accessories. Fairbanks has been making history-inspired fashions since founding Recollections in 1981, so the task of creating that particular style of dresses wasn’t anything new. Neither was creating for the television or film industry as she’s been involved in other high profile projects over the years.

Still, the excitement of creating for an HBO miniseries wasn’t lost on either her or her staff.

“Whenever we deal with television or film, they have impossible deadlines, but I’ve got a great crew here,” Fairbanks said. “They are always up to the challenge, especially if they know their work will eventually be on television and HBO. The fabric cutters all wanted to be involved here and so did the seamstresses. Everyone had a chance to work on a dress.”

That’s not bad for a business headquartered in the small Northeast Michigan town of Hawks. How Fairbanks has made it work for so many years is due to a combination of factors: a lifelong love of sewing, a confessed workaholic nature, a willingness to embrace technology and and outstanding staff.

“Sewing was something that I loved doing ever since I was 6 years old,” Fairbanks said. “I can remember sewing doll clothing with a needle and thread, and making a skirt. My mother, aunt and grandmother all taught me to sew.”

She credits her grandmother with teaching her to use a sewing machine. By the time she was 8 or 9, she’d started making her own clothing and by high school, had branched out to also making clothing for her friends.

Fairbanks, who grew up in the southern part of the state, admits to having always been drawn to vintage styles.

“I always loved the Victorian era and the Edwardian era,” she said. “I’m an avid reader. The descriptions of the dresses in novels were so wonderful. I looked at what we wore as contemporary human beings and thought, wait a minute, something is missing here. Why are we wearing jeans and sweats when we could be wearing beautiful dresses?”

She went on to study clothing and textiles at the University of Detroit Mercy, where she recalls taking pattern-making classes from the nuns. After graduating in the late 1970s, Fairbanks parlayed her love of dresses and her skills for making them into a home-based sewing business. A few years later, she began making the history-inspired clothing on a limited basis and for a limited market.

“It was a line with just some basic bloomers, camisoles and petticoats, and then blouses and dresses and skirts. It just grew,” said Fairbanks.

She ultimately moved her operations to Hawks, where her cottage industry today is run out of the former Bismarck Township Hall. Civil War renactors, museum docents, American Wild West aficionados and others with a particular bent toward period wear all purchase the fashions.

Marketing Director Donna Klein said currently thousands of handmade pieces are shipped out of Reflections each year. Prices for dresses range from $100 up to $595, with orders coming from all over the United States and various countries abroad, including Australia, Great Britain, Canada and China.

The growth is due in part to the advent of Internet sales.

“The business has changed over the years, because the world has changed,” Fairbanks said. “We saw a big bump in sales in about 2000 when the Internet came around. Before that I was trying to sell to a very narrow audience through sales reps and schlepping items to New York for trade shows. The Internet changed everything because you could appeal to people all over the world who had the same love.”

About 10 years into her business venture, Fairbanks opted to move up north. She continued working out of her home, but she hired additional employees who also worked from home cutting, sewing and finishing garments. In the end, Fairbanks decided to centralize her operation.

“I wanted to get people centralized and get some commercial machinery,” she said of the move to the former Bismarck Township Hall. “Everyone was using home machines, which was unbelievable with the products we were putting out.”

About half of her staff continues to work from home, while the other half works at the shop, including staff members who insure quality control, take online and phone orders, pack the finished garments and ship them out to their new owners.

Their user-friendly website, recollections.biz, features a wide selection of available styles, including theater, movie and television-inspired period lines such as “Downton Abbey,” “Wizard of Oz,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “My Fair Lady.” A particularly popular line, according to Klein, is one geared toward people attending the “Somewhere in Time” weekends held at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island.

Many of the dresses come with names like Emma or Daisy or Amelia.

While Fairbanks has made a successful career out of her love of sewing for many years now, she doesn’t plan on slowing down anytime soon.

“If I didn’t still love to do it, I wouldn’t still be doing it. I’m considered a work-alcoholic, and I came to grips with that a long time ago. I work seven days a week. Lots of time I work from home, doing a lot of website work,” she said, adding that she often puts in 10 to 12-hour days.”

Everyone, including Fairbanks, was more than willing to put in the time on the HBO project, which kept growing in scope and involved a quick turnaround.

“The conversation started in February, and we had everything in by April,” said Klein, noting that the HBO point person on the costumes is a Michigan native. “At first we thought is was a just a few dresses they needed.”

When it was all said and done, Fairbanks and her staff had created the 37 dresses, plus 13 headpieces, various other hats and about a dozen pairs of boots. That’s why seeing the show when it aired on television on Aug. 5 was a must for the Recollections owner and staff.