Major: BFA Fashion Design
Hometown: Upstate New York
Fine art was my gateway into fashion, I stopped painting and started making clothes when I was 16 and the interest continued to grow. An art degree was never something I intended to pursue, it just sort of happened when I moved to California from the east coast. I’m really glad I decided to obtain a design degree. I feel that it’s given me the language to express an interest and a passion that I’ve had inside of me since I was a teenager. It’s very liberating to know that any idea that I have I can make happen now that I have the technical knowledge.
My senior thesis is about defining my personal process. I wanted to break away from the standard way that students typically work to design their final collections, so a lot of my looks were made on the fly and draped out of re-purposed clothing, cutting out the toiling process altogether. I love the risk and the immediacy that comes from working this way.
I’m also an aspiring textile designer and will be pursuing an MFA in textile Design this fall so I wanted to work with print. all of the textile prints you see in my collection are designed by me.
My collection is unique because of the way that I approached it. I didn’t design looks; instead, I designed pieces and styled them into looks. To address sustainability, I worked a lot with re-purposed clothing and old materials I already had on hand and I designed my own textiles.
