18 Illustration courtesy of Presley Turner. During our second check-in with designers, we met with Presley Turner, who introduced us to her romantic collection “Fairest of Them All” based on the enchanting fairy tales we all know and love. The nostalgia aspect of these stories and her childhood play a big part in sourcing her inspiration. “The inspiration for my collection is based on this old storybook of the original fairytales that was my mom’s as a child. She learned to read from that book and then read it to me as a child. So, while drumming up collection ideas, I just happened to go back and look at those stories and was really inspired. Plus, the theme felt really on-trend as Disney is remaking all of their classic stories in live action, so it’s an idea I’m passionate about,” said Turner. Her process mirrored Ayers’ but differed in how she found threads of symmetry for her looks. Turner noted that reading through the storybook played a large role in developing her design concepts and deciding which details she wanted to incorporate. The most significant of these decisions was the incorporation of red beading and details across the collection to symbolize the origin story of Snow White, a personal favorite of Turner. However, the process hasn’t been a “fairytale.” In the Fall semester, the designers were tasked with two complete looks from their collection. “I finished those looks, but halfway through Winter break, I pulled the plug on one of them,” said Turner, “and now I’m a little behind. My collection is about 25% complete, but I’m happy I made that decision because it will be better.” According to Turner and Ayers, this is all just part of the process. From minor adjustments to significant revisits, design is a push-andpull industry. Turner noted, “Redoing things because you hate them is also part of the creative process. With everything you create, you stare at it until you hate it, then at it, until you love it again.” Turner found that to reign true, mainly as she worked to pull inspiration and looks from stories that cross different countries and cultures and have differing messages to create cohesion among her designs. “It’s been beneficial that we can focus on our designs and how we want them to come to life, as the production class handles the operational components of the fashion show,” said Turner. The Euphoria class allocates time and resources to finding models, running modeling workshops, organizing hair and makeup, and finalizing all the details. When we left Turner, she was back at the drawing board to redo the pattern on the outfit she scraped and was heading into a fitting to finalize the “Snow Queen” look for her collection. MARCH
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