BY DESIGN : The Class of ’94 : Designers: Three from L.A.’s new crop stand ready to unleash their flash and splash on the real world.
After months of sketching, pattern-making, fitting and sewing, students at L.A.’s design schools got a chance to strut their stuff recently at semester-end fashion shows. Now, it’s time to test their skills in the real world. These three young designers--from the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, Otis College of Art and Design, and L.A. Trade Tech--seem to have promising futures.
FIDM: Janet Baluyot’s first creation was a Diane von Furstenberg-style wrap dress for her Barbie doll. A few years later, she made herself a cotton twill tank dress that was, in a word, “awful.” But thanks to a family of seamstresses and summers spent in Italy, Baluyot’s skills improved considerably.
For her final school project this spring, she went Hollywood, creating a wardrobe for a fictional Academy Awards-bound starlet. “When her name is announced as a winner,” Baluyot says, “she snaps on the skirt--which has a long train that trails behind her.”
Inspired by designers as diverse as Jean-Louis Scherrer and Anna Sui, Baluyot, who’s already snagged a job with a junior-sportswear company, spends her days working on very simple clothing--”totally opposite” of the elegantly flamboyant styles she loves. But who knows what the future may bring?
Otis: Sunita Linde came to Los Angeles from a tiny island off the coast of British Columbia to study photography. Unfortunately, at the end of her freshman year, Otis closed its photo department. “I figured, ‘I can sew,’ ” she says, and she promptly changed her major to fashion design.
The surprise was that designing came so easily: “I don’t want to sound arrogant. I was lucky.” For someone who never thought about fashion, Linde bit off a big challenge for her final school project: a wedding dress she describes as “a big ol’ cake.” But not a piece of cake. Linde never mastered using a thimble, and after a considerable amount of sewing by hand, her fingers looked like tiny pin cushions. It didn’t matter, she says: “I was faster without it.”
Since graduating, Linde has been redoing her portfolio--tearing out illustrations she did primarily for teachers, substituting ideas meant to satisfy only herself. “Now that I’m out of there, nobody can criticize my work,” she says with a laugh. Only problem is, “I don’t know what me is.”
L.A. Trade Tech: Denise Taylor Brown started sewing when she was 12. By high school, she was staging her own fashion shows. A stint as a showroom model after graduation didn’t lead--as she had hoped--to a career as a print model. “It wasn’t a good time for African American models,” she says.
So she concentrated on her job as a media buyer, wife and mother of two. But two years ago, with the “desire to fulfill a longtime dream,” Brown enrolled in L.A. Trade Tech’s fashion design program. She graduates this month, scoring an Honorable Mention for her final project, a suit made from mud cloth from Mali.
“I like the African influence--cotton fabrics and vibrant colors,” she says. What’s out there now, she says, are garments much too traditional for African American women to wear to work: “They don’t want to be classified in any particular way.”
Through experimentation, Brown found that ethnic prints stitched into classically tailored and lined suits were more corporate-friendly. “I’ve seen it done on a small scale,” says Brown, who has just landed a job at US Boys, a sportswear maker. “I want to mass-produce it.”
