Caliber X Scholarship

I am entering the field of fashion design with the end goal of having my own boutique filled with my original designs. I have always been creative as a child, painting on my walls and filling notebooks with drawings. I experimented with all art forms, writing, painting, drawing, graphic design, even pottery. But fashion design has stuck with me and proved to not just be a hobby. It is a passion that I am eager to turn into a career. I took up sewing my freshmen year of high school and have grown incredibly as a designer. Over quarantine during the pandemic, with all my free time I began to sew clothes I designed and ran a small business selling them. By becoming a fashion designer, I hope to create something people haven't seen before. While every upcoming designer says this, I have devoted years perfecting my craft and believe I have something to offer for the world when it comes to fashion. I love history and reading, I love making meaningful art that can ignite insightful and philosophical conversations about religion, the human psyche, love, and mental health. And I want my clothes to provoke thought by others. I want my clothes to not only be beautifully crafted and pleasing to the eye, but I want layers of symbolism and motifs to be present and can be studied and interpreted by the person wearing them. I am writing half the story through my clothes, and it is up to the wearer to continue and finish that story. I have taken much inspiration from the late fashion icon, Lee Alexander McQueen. He was a true visionary and took the world by storm with the eccentricity of his creations. His work extended outside the fashion community and everyone associated him with the bizarre nature of his clothes, but past his notorious runway shows, I loved taking apart the message he conveyed through his clothing. Like him, I want my collections to be overflowing with meaning and breaking out of what society deems normal. He did not take fashion too seriously, and I am a firm believer in it. Clothes are what you make of them, some can purely be for aesthetic purposes, while others can change lives. For me, it is important to maintain a perfect balance between the two. I am able to do this as having fun as an artist and a thinker, drawing inspiration from common things such as movies, music, and history we all have learned; I want to interpret them in a way no one has thought of before. And being an artist, I am able to create visual motifs that represent these ideas. And being a designer, I am able to cohesively include these in clothes and not only create visually stunning looks, but intellectually digestible pieces. I am eager to start my journey as a designer, and even more eager to show the world what I have to offer.