Help Me Get to NY Fashion Week!

Flora Cervantes is organizing this fundraiser.

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mood board that I collaged

As many of you know, I left NY three years ago to pursue my Master's degree in fine art at the Academy of Art University. I left a promising career in the insurance industry, to follow a long held dream to become a fashion designer. Although I learned a great deal in my former occupation, I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life in a creative pursuit. While I was working in New York, I was going to school at night at F.I.T. My experience juggling both work and school made me understand that if I wanted to realize my dream, I was going to have commit fully and that's just what I did. I saved as much money as I could and I packed my bags for San Francisco to attend one of the highest ranked fashion design programs in US. Fast forward three years and here we are. When I came to AAU it was my goal to complete the program by creating a women's wear design collection to show at New York Fashion week and the time has finally arrived. I have spent the last three years developing and honing my fashion design skills and personal aesthetic. The culmination of all this work is my final design collection. Although I have worked hard the last three years to put myself through school, I need your help to go the last mile.

How can you help?

New York Fashion week is in just two months and hopefully I will be there showing my final MFA thesis collection as a representative for the Academy of Art, but I need your help to get there. A typical collection costs anywhere between 10 to 20 thousand dollars. I am hoping to fundraise $10,000. This will cover the cost of making the collection including sampling. In order to create the best fit and shape for our garments, I have to sew up sample garments to be fit on models. In addition to sampling, the money will go towards final fabrics, sewing notions, pattern paper, lining fabrics, interfacing fabrics, shipping the final collection to NY, travel expenses to and from NY, shoes for the models and much more.

Although $10,000 sounds like a huge sum of money, I can get there if I can find just 200 people to donate $50 each. Of course, I would be honored to receive any donation that you can afford. Every dollar counts! I am more grateful than I can even express for whatever assistance you can give me.

A little bit about my work:

Although I can't show you the actual designs before the show in February, I can tell you a bit about what inspires me, what inspired the collection and show you some of my work to date.

As a New York City girl, my environment constantly inspires me. I love the raw gritty textures of the city. I love how concrete, old concert flyers and car exhaustion can fuse together to make something beautiful. Some might say it's dirty or garbage, but I see so much beauty in it. My work concentrates greatly in finding this beauty. It is about bridging the gap between things that might be discarded and precious beautiful items. I am drawn to the idea of polarities and how they might coexist and mingle together. Here are some images of my previous work:

Sketches from a previous design project

Hand dyed silk print and weaved textiles that I created

The above sketch shows how the hand painted textile is used in a sketch

hand dyed fabric with beading

process board from an old project

So what is my collection about?

My final thesis, from a practical design perspective, is inspired by the twisting shapes found in nature. But it is also inspired by the emotion of having been twisted and bent by life. One is toughened by life, but not necessarily jaded by the harshness. I see these much like old trees in an open field; wind blown for many years and bent and twisted as a result. They have almost morphed into a totally new entity.

I am very honored to be paired with a textile designer, Lori Solem, at the Academy. She will be creating one of kind textiles for my collection that are inspired by gritty industrial textures and paint that you see in the below images. Below are some images from my design studio. These are the very images that have inspired the final collection.