日別アーカイブ: 2017年6月9日

North Van designer living dream in NYC

It’s 6:30 in the evening and Laura Levine is just finishing up her day at work in the city that never sleeps.

Levine is living the dream, working as an associate designer for New York fashion house Cinq à Sept with its headquarters a few blocks from Times Square.

“I’ve kind of grown to dodge Times Square. It’s pretty hectic up there,” says Levine with a laugh.

She grew up in quintessentially quiet North Vancouver, near Edgemont Village, graduating from Handsworth in 2007. Afterwards, Levine earned a bachelor of arts degree in economics from the University of Victoria.

Her aha moment came shortly after Levine got a job in the economics field.

“I was doing basically data entry for a company and I think I just realized there kind of had to be more than just this,” recalls Levine.

With one foot already out the door, Levine told her parents she was at a career crossroads.

They had observed their daughter from a young age sketching feminine silhouettes and sewing every chance she got, turning doodles into clothes for her Barbies.

She’d dig into a dress-up trunk full of her mom’s 1970s and ‘80s fashion and repurpose the garments using a sewing machine in the basement.

Her parents knew where her heart was.

“My mom said to me: ‘You’re the youngest you are ever going to be, you might as well spend the rest of your life doing what you love.’”

The day Levine received her acceptance letter from Parsons The New School for Design, she envisioned herself immersed in the fashion capital of the world.

“I was walking around and getting yelled at by taxi drivers and being pushed around by pedestrians – that’s when you realize you are in New York,” says Levine of her first real New York moment.

Levine studied fashion in the glow of Times Square, where Parsons is located. She did the associate’s program, which Levine describes as rapid fire way to earn a fashion degree.

Parsons, says Levine, prepared her for the intensity of the fashion industry – long hours and a lot of hard work.

The instructors also taught her to think outside the box and flex her creative muscles, as she prepared to enter a saturated fashion market. Levine admits her final thesis collection was a little out there.

Assigned to create something beautiful out of controversy, Levine chose cults. To convey a cult-like, restrictive, brainwashing mindset, Levine used corsets and snug pieces done in a white palette to represent the mind-numbing.

Levine graduated with honours from Parsons, winning the 2015 AAS Fashion Designer of the Year Award, mainly because she didn’t pigeonhole herself as a design student.

Presented with different fashion specializations – print, technical, graphic, woven, knitwear, accessory, leather and lingerie design – Levine tried them all.

Levine interned and later worked for a summer at Rag & Bone, where two designers took Levine under their wings.

She watched the magic and fun unfold in the dye studio, taking paint and splattering it on fabric to see what graphics appear.

What Levine learned at that valuable Rag & Bone stint was not to design for her own style, but with other fashion consumers in mind.

Levine is currently sketching and designing full time with Cinq à Sept, which came onto the New York fashion scene in 2016 and evokes images of the happy hour scene, when “office desks are abandoned for cocktails and as-yet unknown possibilities.”

Sharing its name with the French term for the liminal moment linking late afternoon and early evening, Cinq à Sept creates feminine clothes with a bit of an edge to them, says Levine.

Actress Mindy Kaling recently was seen wearing a Cinq à Sept tunic with slits up the side. The outfit is an embroidery and studded concept Levine came up with, inspired by Moroccan tile and its geometric patterns and vibrant colours.

Kaling is known for her sense of style and exuding confidence when it comes to body image.

“It’s definitely an honour to have her wear something (I designed) and look so great in it,” says Levine.

“I think that when you are designing, it’s easy to design for double zero, but it says a lot when you can design with other body types in mind because there’s not very many people out there who are that, a double zero.”

At Cinq à Sept, Levine also designs embroideries, patches, buttons with logos or any extra embellishments.

She will do the design layouts digitally on a computer, taking inspiration from a flower, for example, and then use a stylus to draw the detail all by hand.

Embroidery and patches are en vogue at the moment, with Levine speculating that craze might have something to with the ‘70s influence on fashion for the past couple years.

Levine and her Cinq design team just had another spread in Vogue magazine. The first time Levine saw her work splashed in the fashion bible, she pinched herself.

“I definitely sent an email to everyone I know with the link,” she says. “I was really excited about it.”

Levine makes it back home to North Vancouver a couple times a year to see her family and friends. Thoughts of La Galleria sandwiches and Ambleside also make her homesick.

“I miss how beautiful it is there and the quiet – you don’t get a lot of that here,” says Levine, with a laugh.Read more at:blue prom dresses | black prom dresses

カテゴリー: fashion | 投稿者tedress 18:33 | コメントをどうぞ