Rachel Teague – Senior Thesis Project 2021

Major: BFA Fashion Design

Hometown: Agoura Hills, California

I knew as a senior we would have our senior collections and I wanted to connect with mine on a personal level. I had lost my father a few years ago and he was an incredible industrial designer. He was the whole reason why I chose to attend Academy of Art University – he had worked here years ago. With this, I collected old sketches of his, to collage and develop silhouettes. I even developed a textile and hand-carved in a lino block and printed one by one on my fabric. As a kid, I saw how tedious the craftsmanship was that my dad had put in his work and that’s what I wanted to portray in this collection.

I chose denim and jersey as my main source of fabrics through this collection because, looking back on old family photos, my father always wore a pair of raggedy jeans and a jersey golf shirt. These were his staples and if I was going to make a collection inspired by him those were always going to be the fabrics. Another factor I wanted to contribute to my father was his color blindness. You wouldn’t even know that he was colored blind because he worked so well with the colors he couldn’t see. He couldn’t see reds rather he saw them as green. This is why I chose to emulate these, however instead of using vibrant colors I wanted them to be desaturated. This was to depict the loss of vibrancy I felt in myself when he was gone. As you can notice with each choice that was made for this collection, there is a meaning behind it, connecting myself and him. 

Model: Maddie Lucarelli
Photographer: Brynn Gibson