By: Veda Manly, Fashion Team
Happy Women's History Month! This month we celebrate the strong, brave, smart, beautiful, talented, and wonderful women from history. I thought that it would be appropriate to appreciate wonderful women designers who changed the game… specifically, women of color designers (since ALT is all about diversity). As I searched for designers, I was surprised (but also not surprised) to find that there aren’t many women of color designers that are really big. It’s hard enough to find big female designers (since it’s typically been a male dominated field), and finding influential WOC designers is even harder. Here are a few WOC designers who you may or may not have heard of, and who I am inspired by.
Carly Cushnie and Michelle Ochs:
Co-founders of Cushnie et Ochs (Est. 2008) created their line by women for women. They combine bold but minimalist designs and mix clean lines with perfect fits. They graduated from Parsons School of Design and their fashion is sleek, sexy, and modern. First Lady Michelle Obama, Blake Lively, and Khloe Kardashian have all worn their designs.
Tracy is a designer from Detroit who specializes in women’s ready-to-wear fashion and is a board member of the Council of Fashion Designers of America. After graduating from Persons School of Design, she worked under Martine Sitbon and other top fashion design houses before launching her own label.
Anna Sui is another designer from Detroit and is one of the “Top 5 fashion icons of the decade” and has earned the Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award. Her brand has fashion lines, footwear, cosmetics, fragrances, eyewear, jewelry, and more. After finishing her second year at Parsons, she was hired by the Erica Elias clothing label and worked as a stylist for Meisel’s shoots. While working for other designers, she starting designing her own products before her major breakthrough during the 1991 Paris Fashion week.
Rei Kawakubo is the founder of Comme des Garcon and Dover Street Market. Born in Tokyo, Japan, she studied fine arts at Keio University. After college she worked in an advertising department for a textiles company before working freelance in 1967. Soon she started creating her own designs and opened her first boutique in 1975. Her designs included a lot of blacks and grays and were often frayed and unfinished.
Arguably one of the most famous people on this list, Vera Wang is an American designer who specializes in wedding dresses, but also does ready-to-wear fashion, tuxedos, and more. She attended the University of Paris and earned an art history degree from Sarah Lawrence college. After she failed to make it to the Olympics for figure skating, she decided to enter the fashion industry. She was an editor for Vogue for 17 years before leaving and becoming a bridal wear designer.