I often get asked, “What do you do?” and I say, “I help make T-shirts people order online” because it’s true if I’m working for a big company, or “I’m a Seamstress” because it has a funny history in Seattle, but most often I say “Fashion Designer” which people understand broadly. Less often people ask, “Why did you choose to be a Fashion Designer?” and the pragmatic answer is I like working with my hands, my brain, and other people, I like petting pretty textiles, and people always need clothes. Truly, I’ve always loved clothes. It’s a fascinating costume everyone chooses to wear everyday and it is a form of communication. My favorite independent fashion journalist Bliss Foster often asserts “it is [humanity’s] only enduring wearable art form” and I agree!

My work and viewpoint benefits from my explorations prior to making garments my career, prior to attending fashion school. For instance, I learned a love of process and examining all the tiniest pieces of a thing through Microbiology. I learned to embrace the attitude of play, hard work, and community building when I, making good on my childhood declaration that I would run away to the Circus, joined the entertainment industry and loved it. I’m driven by a need to always broaden the edges of my map.

Luckily, I had an introduction to arts, music, theater, and a diversity of cultures very early on. I’m grateful to my Omma for insisting on going to art museums and letting me in on her world as a painter, my Father for reading to me of Tolkien’s forests and giving me National Geographic, Robert Frost, and Masterpiece theater as growing companions, my piano instructor for instilling in me that discipline, dexterity, analysis, and deep emotional expression do not have to be separated to be worth one’s time, to the teachers who challenged me directly or indirectly, and most of all my Auntie who put up with a precocious 10 year old me learning to sew on a machine so I really could make the world’s best cape for picture day.

People don’t have to know all this to know I want them to get the best out of their items that I work on, but I hope through all of that I’ve become someone who shows it in the process- that I’m technical, sure, but I care about people and their clothes.