NY Fashion Week: Meet the studentsFashion writer Laura Palmer learns more about the Bay Area students who showed in New York. Read her account of the fashion show here.
The seven fashion design students who showed at Bryant Park this season seem to reflect the Bay Area’s diverse cultural quilt. Here we unfurl the designs of all seven students, shake out their insights and inspiration, and uncover the daily lives of our budding local designers.
Amanda Cleary
A native Californian, Amanda Cleary’s designs were inspired by packages. No, no, not that kind of package. Actual boxes. Her vinyly angular shifts have multiple armholes, square shoulders, and a dimension that does, in fact, suggest duct tape and cardboard. Interesting, surely, but as far as form meets function is concerned, the designs would perhaps better suited to a Martian runway, so all four armholes could be filled. If any of the aesthetic from Elie Tahari’s line rubs off on Cleary (since she recently interned with Tahairi), Cleary's next fashion week jaunt may be more cohesive.
When she’s not busy with bonding (one fabric to another, that is), Cleary is watching flicks at Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland.
Sawanya Jomthepmala
The geometric, origami designs that Sawanya Jomthepmala created were inspired by the stained glass in Thai Buddhist temples and the boats fashioned out of banana leaves during the Krathong Festival. (The boats are floated out to sea to bring good fortunes to those that release them.)
A double major in fashion and textile design, Jomthepmala used what she had learned in both programs, melding her love of tailoring with the more conceptual design process. “Geometric designs are getting more popular,” she notes, covering her hesitant English with a soft smile. Jomthepmala is quite right, and I think her paper-fold dresses may have been released as just the right moment, carrying an offering of good fortune to the women who float off with them.
Ritchelle Valenzuela
Ritchelle Valenzuela came to fashion from a painting background. He and a few friends started up the !Hey! gallery in Oakland, a boutique/gallery space. “I was around fashion all the time, so it just sort of came naturally to me,” he said. “I figured out the construction element quickly.” On a break from cutting gauze, Valenzuela gets his fill of burritos and tostadas at Oakland’s Cactus Taqueria.
Brittney Major
The smoothed and primed Southern belle Brittney Major lives an idyllic life in Lake Merritt, where she plays with plaid, pairs prints and solids, and adjusts ruffles late into the night. “I see my line as classic, with a sophisticated twist.,” she says. Which is probably how she takes her drinks when she skips over to Cato’s Ale House.
Kara Sennett
And we have our California dreamer, Kara Sennett. As a child, Sennett would conjure up idealized images of West Coast life, though she was raised on military bases abroad. “I always loved the whole idea of California,” she says. So it was no surprise that she came to study in San Francisco.
“In designing my collection, I thought of a 20-something-girl coming home from surfing all day, taking a shower, and putting on something to both hang out in and run around town,” Sennett writes via email. “California to me always has this relaxed-yet-put-together look about it.”
Sennett says she’s adopted the dress code herself, and it fits perfectly into her California lifestyle when she’s sliding schuckles across the shuffleboard at Buckshot Bar, whiskey by her side.
Jie Pan
The collage cut-out feeling of Jie Pan’s abstract dresses seems to contrast her sugar sweet, somewhat shy personality. The sections and pieces grate against one another visually, and the sharp lines jab the threatening air around the body. I would have expected the designer to be dressed in black, with a tight lips and narrowed eyes, but Pan was all smiles and tears backstage at Bryant Park.
“I’m so emotional, I want to cry,” Pan says. “Everything is so new, but I am so happy.” Pan came to the United Stated from China. After she graduates, she is planning to move to New York to continue her fashion line. You can check out some of Pan’s sketches on her
Marina Nikolaeva Popska moved to San Francisco from Bulgaria with her brother several years ago, and started studying at Academy of Art University to follow the footsteps of her designer mother. Popska has a good sense of the work it takes to form a fashion line. “As a designer, you have to work seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” she says. “You have to be passionate about what you are creating.” Popska is most certainly enthusiastic and passionate, when, at the end of her show, she grabs the models hand with a grand sweep of the arm and waves so exuberantly that she trips offstage.
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