Major: BFA Fashion Design
Hometown: South Pasadena, California
Born and raised in Southern California, I got my start in the arts in high school. I was first introduced to the fashion scene through the punk scene, in which I would frequently paint jackets for friends and add studs to leather jackets. I moved to San Francisco to go to school for a BFA in Fashion Design with a focus in Menswear at Academy of Art University School of Fashion.
My senior thesis collection, Conversion is made to focus on the LGBT+ community through the lens of religion and how LGBT+ people are treated. It was inspired by the movie Boy Erased and the focus of American aesthetics such a bottle stained glass and small home grown churches. There was a focus on lighter wools and seersucker which is pulled from the classic southern clothes, a culture from which can be connected to LGBT+ intolerance.
This collection is unique because it is made with LGBT+ people in mind. The idea was to pull from some of the most marginalized in the LGBT+ community which I am a part of. I wanted to put the spotlight on transgender men, specifically, transgender pre-operation men, for which a clothing market is currently lacking.
