Ju Ju
Major: BFA Fashion Design
Hometown: Yangon, Myanmar
When the pandemic hit, I couldn’t get it out of my head. As a germophobe, it was so hard for me to even get out of the house, and struggled to focus on my senior thesis. I decided to embrace it and centered my collection around it. I decided to create big shapes to encourage social distancing. I used wooden sticks to hold the shapes of these large silhouettes. I began to look more into fear and what causes it. I learned that humans and animals have a natural fear of poisonous animals. The aposematism of poisonous frogs was the inspiration behind the textile design.
Rachel Sampayan
Major: BFA Textile Design
Hometown: Tracy, CA
I have always been into art since childhood but felt pressure from my family to pursue a career in the medical field. It was my grandma, however, who told me to study hard but also strive for what I’m passionate about. You will always find me drawing, cooking, skateboarding, adventuring, or even filming and photographing life so I can remember it in the future.
For this thesis collection, I began by drawing a poisonous frog just to get the idea of how their skin is drawn, how the colors work, and as a warm-up. I eventually came up with many different designs using different mediums (digital, watercolor, heat transfer…) but ended up using only digital drawings made on Procreate on my iPad.
This collection is unique because it’s filled with bold colors and no design is truly the same. However, what brings it together is the structure of the garments, the bold color palette, and the use of shape. Additionally, each textile was designed on the iPad – it is all hand drawn but digitally printed.
