About

Short:

I like lots of shades of blue combined. I hate onions.

Long:

The year was 2006. It was almost summer. I was skating to wrestling practice. I was wearing my dad’s button up shirt. There’s a small hill at the back of my high school that is a parking lot. I began to fall. I fell in a way that would make sure the button up shirt didn’t get scuffed. A thumb was broken that day.

I had a cast all summer which prevented me from going surfing or to the pool, which is what I usually did every day during the summer. I was stuck in my room and I started sewing. I didn’t have a sewing machine so I used my hands. I altered jeans. Denim is insanely hard to hand sew. I used my fiberglass cast to push the needle through the stubbornly thick cotton.

I was in the high school counselor’s office with my mom. I wanted to go to the University of Hawaii so I could surf while I went to college. My mom joked to the counselor about me becoming a fashion designer, due to the fact that I patched up the jeans I was wearing with a sleeve that I ripped off a pink Latin club t-shirt. I took that joke to heart and got serious about fashion. I started taking art classes during my junior and senior year.

I got accepted to Parsons New School of Design and London College of Fashion. I went to New York during spring break to check out the school. I got the flu. New York was out. I decided to go to London College of Fashion without visiting the school. That decision lead to great things.

I started to miss surfing that year. I wanted to leave London to study art back in California. An American journalist and I had a conversation at a clothes swap I was working at. She convinced me to continue my education in the UK. She told me to fill my passport with as many stamps as I could.

I stayed. I applied to do Illustration at the University College Falmouth, a school near the ocean. My tutors at London College of Fashion told me to study fashion since I could always draw on my own time. Around that time, a man from the University College Falmouth came to visit my school and talked about a Performance Sportswear Design course that just started. I like skating, surfing and snowboarding. Combine those guys with fashion and you get performance sportswear design.

I got my BA degree in Performance Sportswear Design three amazing years later.

I’m stoked.