Daily Bruin

Last year, Caliope Marin and Risachi Ogan walked the runway at an annual fashion show.

This year, they designed the clothes instead of wearing them.

Marin, a third-year neuroscience and human biology and society student, and Ogan, a fourth-year molecular, cell and developmental biology student, said they witnessed a lack of body-type diversity in the 2018 Fashion and Student Trends at UCLA fashion show. Walking as models opened their eyes to how Eurocentric styles dominated the show, and they were motivated to design their own line, Curvy in Color, in hopes of inspiring all women to feel beautiful and empowered, Ogan said.

“A lot of the designers didn’t fit the models, so a lot of the women that are curvier were left out,” Marin said. “It is 2019 – we should be celebrating all different types of bodies, sizes and colors – and we weren’t seeing that.”

Marin and Ogan designed a 10-piece clothing line that fuses Marin’s Mexican heritage with Ogan’s Nigerian culture. With pieces ranging from streetwear to formal dresses, Marin and Ogan said they integrated both backgrounds by using vibrant colors, culturally distinct patterns and various fabrics prominent in both cultures that could fit models of varying sizes.

Marin used patterns like those of serapes – which are brightly colored shawls – and Huichol floral prints that she purchased at Mercado Hidalgo, a large marketplace which sells souvenirs, clothes and food from Tijuana, Baja California. She also incorporated roses into her designs, as she said they are symbolic of beauty and hope in Mexican culture. The roses will be added as patterns on dresses and used as accessories in the models’ hair, Marin said. Marin also included off-the-shoulder blouses and dresses; while the trend may be popular in America, the look originated from Pueblo women, she said.

Additionally, Ogan said they tried to infuse traditional American styles of clothing to reflect how they both grew up in the United States. One of their pieces was inspired by an old, green men’s button-up they found at Goodwill. They found a similar fabric at an African fabric store in Downtown Los Angeles and paired the top with a mustard-yellow pattern because African fabrics, specifically Ankara prints, often incorporate bright colors, Ogan said. In this way, Marin and Ogan were able to depart from typical Eurocentric styles while still portraying their American identity.

“You can still be proud of who you are while acknowledging that we are American,” Marin said. “We can wear the same stuff and still celebrate where we come from.”

Despite their goal to celebrate their cultural identities through clothing, Ogan said she was concerned about cultural appropriation because not every model reflects the culture their outfit celebrates. However, she said she believes people can wear styles from different cultures as long as they are educated about the clothing’s origins and significance. Marin and Ogan prepared a speech they will give during the dress rehearsal about why they chose to use the fabric the models are wearing and the cultural significance of each aspect of their designs.

Ogan said they also want to promote body positivity through their designs. When she was model in the 2018 show, Ogan was unable to model certain lines because the designers did not take her measurements before the dress rehearsal. While Ogan still walked for some designers, she said the experience adversely affected her self-esteem. She hopes to combat this by taking the measurements of all their models and then creating each outfit specifically to their measurements, she said.

One of the Curvy in Color’s models, third-year sociology and Chicana and Chicano studies student Roselia Rodriguez, said she will model a dress with a rose pattern. She said Marin and Ogan’s designs will help empower young girls who feel as if they do not fit into the “skinny category” to feel confident.

“I feel excited and honored to be representing a body type that has been stereotyped as not beautiful because we are indeed absolutely gorgeous,” Rodriguez said.

In addition to celebrating more body types, Marin said she hopes their line can expose people to the beauty of other cultures. Ogan said their primary goal with Curvy in Color is to challenge society’s ideals of what and who is viewed as attractive and fashionable.

“People should feel beautiful in both their cultures and their bodies, regardless of what they are wearing,” Ogan said. “We shouldn’t be trying to fit clothes, we should be making clothes that fit us, the person.”

After some tweaking, styles from Gap Kids can also suit adults.

Suchita Kumar, a second-year physiological science student, said she designed a fashion line fusing children’s wear with late 20th-century trends. The six-look collection will be featured Thursday as part of the annual Fashion and Student Trends runway show. Kumar’s line, titled “Shaila,” is inspired by childhood memories of rummaging through her mother’s closet for clothes that she then paired with her own, she said.

“I really like incorporating things from ’90s and ’80s children fashion, and even current children’s fashion and seeing how that can be modified to work for adult fashion,” Kumar said.

Kumar’s secret trips into her mother’s closet often involved mixing and matching their clothes, she said. Shaila Kumar, Suchita’s mother, said her daughter would also dress her younger siblings.

“I was going through (old) pictures, and I saw one of her sister wrapped with the blanket going over one shoulder, like a one-shoulder dress,” Shaila Kumar said. “I guess that aspect of creativity was still there back then.”

Growing up in Bangalore, India, Suchita Kumar found herself wearing a school uniform most of the time, limiting her opportunities to experiment with clothing. But going through the vibrant colors and patterns of her mom’s closet piqued her interest in the enjoyable side of fashion, she said. Following her move to Los Angeles, she faced fewer limitations on what she could wear in public, which rapidly grew her inclination toward fashion.

To recreate her childhood fashion experiments, Kumar said she used fabrics and colors similar to those she found in her mother’s closet. Her mother had a wealth of silk and satin garments, as well as a multitude of sheer, chiffon pieces of both Western and traditional Indian wear.

Kumar said her mother often wore brightly colored, heavy fabrics paired with sheer, light fabrics. While she visited Bangalore in the summer, Kumar and her mother shopped for fabric together, picking out bold-colored satin and netted tulle.

“(My mother) helped a lot with the narrative component of it, telling me what she remembers was fashionable when she was buying these clothes,” Kumar said.

Though all her pieces share a white and primary colors scheme, she said each outfit is best suited for a different occasion. The formality of the looks will progress throughout the show, the first outfit being a casual dress and the last an evening gown.

Many sources inspired the collection: some items are western renditions of traditional Indian garments. One of her looks is inspired by an “anarkali” – a long, A-line top traditionally paired with matching bottoms. Though her piece has a similar cut, its sheer material and lack of bottoms reimagines the Indian ensemble in a Western style, she said. Her final two looks are accessorized with a “dupatta,” a scarf that is a staple in Indian dress. Made from white tulle and red satin, the dupattas cover the models’ necks, accompanying a tube top in one outfit and a formal gown in the other.

Amy Fang, a second-year design media arts student and Kumar’s roommate, said Kumar would sew in their room whenever she had free time. Fang said Kumar would often bounce ideas off her during the conception phase of the line, and that she also helped with sewing. Kumar struggled with assembling muslin flowers onto a skirt, and Fang said struggling through these periods of frustration helped her roommate grow as a designer.

The concept for “Shaila” began as fond memories of her playing in her mother’s closet, and Shaila Kumar said Suchita has always dabbled in creative activities, such as knitting and creative writing, and she has enjoyed watching her childhood hobbies lead to the fashion line. Suchita Kumar said it was gratifying to make it all come together over the past year.

“It brings back that sense of nostalgia of rummaging through your mother’s closet and seeing what’s in there,” Suchita Kumar said. “(I’m) creating a novel experience where (the audience) gets to experience what it was like for me, … and how that experience was so foundational in the fashion choices (I made) later on.”

Josephine Qi designed her first clothing line, “Pisces,” based on fish and stars because she found the concept amusing.

The first-year pre-economics student first developed the idea after seeing a young boy’s shirt featuring fish heads attached to human legs, and she later designed a fish-centric line in high school. She created Pisces for Thursday’s Fashion and Student Trends at UCLA runway show based on those sketches, but made them less ambitious so she could sew them and bring her designs to life, she said. Pisces also has an astrological connotation, and while Qi said she doesn’t know much about horoscopes, she named the line because of the word’s association with fish and the stars.

“I guess it’s because I was exposed to so much of that and I started to think, ‘Wow, this aesthetic is really cool,’” Qi said. “I’m just one of those people who saw (astrology) so prevalent in modern society, and I just kind of got on the bandwagon.”

When it comes to the recent astrology trend, there are two distinct groups of people: those passionate about the topic and those who don’t believe in it, said Qi’s friend Hatim Malek. The second-year political science student said Qi’s line finds a middle ground between the two sides. Because the line is inspired by astrology, Malek said the name will intrigue those who are interested in it, as well as those who aren’t.

“(Qi) finds (astrological signs) interesting but she’s nowhere near as passionate about it as, say, someone like me,” Malek said. “She was still able to find inspiration from it and use it in her fashion line … (taking) a very lighthearted approach with it which I definitely appreciate.”

Pisces includes a total of six pieces, following a general color scheme of dark and light blues, Qi said. The piece she said she is most excited about includes a giant fish head with large googly eyes worn over the shoulders, which cuts off just underneath the model’s eyes so they can still see. Qi used a dollar-store flower wreath made out of wires as the base for the fish head. The rest of the dress sparkles from glitter, tulle and stars flowing down to the floor in a long fish tail train, which is meant to create a feeling of fluidity, she said.

“You get the flowy feeling from water and how the fish moves and then you get this sort of flowy vagueness of space, and I wanted to try to connect that,” Qi said.

Qi’s roommate, Lucy Huo, a first-year undeclared engineering student and another FAST designer, said it has been interesting to see Qi incorporate unconventional materials – such as googly eyes and cotton balls – in her designs, many of which are from the dollar store. Huo said she usually sees Qi cutting material out, such as dainty stars to put on her clothes to add more visual dimensions. Creating actual clothes is more difficult than sketching them, she said, because it’s important to keep in mind the dimensions and curves of an actual body as opposed to a flat, 2D one.

“It has been interesting figuring out how to sew and make clothes and go from drawings to actual 3D objects,” Huo said. “It’s easy to draw crazy dresses and stuff but actually making it is a lot tougher because you would need structuring.”

Many of Qi’s pieces are crafted to maintain a certain shape, such as a fish head emerging from the torso with a fish body stemming from the back. To create a sturdy silhouette, Qi said she bent wire and aluminum which she then covered with polyester fabric along with silver, white and light-blue glitter. In other designs, she also incorporated koi fish-patterned fabric, which was used to create a skirt, and bought fish-patterned shower curtains from Target, which were repurposed for a jacket and a fish-tail piece. For another design, Qi created a cloud vest that hangs off the neck and shoulders using pillow stuffing and string lights to resemble a galaxy.

“I didn’t realize having my ideas would be unfeasible with the time, money and materials that I had, so I had to make it up as I went along,” Qi said.

Qi said she sometimes wishes she took a more serious direction with her line and respects designers who are passionate about what they do. But because fashion designing is more of a hobby for her than anything else, Qi said she mainly aims to enjoy the designing process, which emerges from adding small details – like googly eyes.

“I want to enjoy what I do, and my sense of humor is so childish that it won’t be fun unless what I think I’m doing is funny,” Qi said. “I’m doing this, one, to learn about fashion, and two, to have fun.”