Designing Women : For Students at the Fashion Institute, Inspiration Is Where They Find It--and How It Looks
Caroline Vega and her roommate alternate using the kitchen, but neither of them is fighting for rights to the stove. She’s a student of fashion design, he’s a writer, and they both want dibs on the kitchen’s picnic table.
“I work on a wooden picnic bench that’s set up in the kitchen. It’s a big old mess,” she says. “Yesterday John was typing, so today I’m sewing.”
Vega, 20, is a student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Sherman Oaks, where “struggling” always seems to accompany the word “designer.” She and fellow students Yael Kempler and Patricia Timmel share enthusiasm for a profession in which it isn’t easy to make a name for yourself.
Vega, a second-year design student, is, like her peers, constantly creating new designs. Something seemingly mundane, like walking Ventura Boulevard, can get her going.
“If I see something that’s totally popular, and I hate it--I’ll go just the opposite,” she said. She likes to mix contrasting lengths and silhouettes, and cites Cher as someone she’d like to design for because of her free spirit. She also identifies with name designers Isei Miyaki and Theirry Mugler.
“I like wide-legged pants a lot,” she said, and refers to her recent creation of a “flared, slightly bell-bottomed pair.”
Her fashion sense is rooted in a semi-rural past. “I grew up in Santa Paula in Ventura County. It’s kind of rural. I joined 4-H when I was 10 and that’s when I started sewing,” she said, acknowledging that her Mexican-American heritage also played a significant role in developing her flair for bright, flashy colors in flowing and feminine designs.
For Kempler, who also lives in Sherman Oaks and is a second-year student at the institute, the pursuit of fashion design makes perfect sense. The 24-year-old native Israeli, who moved to the United States three years ago, used to sell her clothing on blankets on the busy streets of Rehovot, a town 20 minutes from Tel Aviv.
“All my life, I sewed. But I didn’t know patterns,” she said, remembering the long hours she spent as a young girl, working with her mother over the sewing machine. “I have always invented clothes.”
Kempler spends at least three full days a week conceptualizing and sewing her designs. On weekends, she sketches for as long as five hours a day. She also teaches Hebrew two afternoons a week at a nearby temple.
“I can’t go to sleep until I have the idea in my mind of how the design will look. In the morning, I wake up thinking about the same idea,” she says. Kempler finds she is most influenced by the ethnic clothing of India, South America, the Far East and Israel, offering as an example her full-legged, harem-style pant designs.
She likes to mix fabrics--silk, chiffon, cottons or rayons--in an outfit. “Let’s say I make a skirt,” she said. “I will have a lot of different fabrics in that skirt. . . . It will be maybe a draped skirt, very full and tumbling.”
Timmel, 29, and also in her second year at the institute, has been making her own clothes since she was 15, when she shot up to her full 5-foot, 10-inch height while other girls were still in training bras.
“When I was younger, nothing fit me--I had to create my own look,” she said.
Today, she concentrates on sexy, slim-fitting outfits. An avid nightclub-goer, she enjoys making comfortable, yet stylish clothes for dancing, often using black Lycra. In addition, she likes working with brightly colored taffeta and some denim fabrics.
“Nothing in my wardrobe matches,” said Timmel, who does free-lance custom work out of her West Hills home.
Like Vega and Kempler, Timmel often has spontaneous ideas. “I don’t just sit down and design something. It comes to me while I’m driving down the road or whatever,” she said.
What does it take to make it in the world of fashion design?
Jerry Bremer, executive director of public relations at the institute, said it takes drive and hard work, just as success in any other profession does.
“The success rate varies,” Bremer said of the students on the campus, which opened in 1971. “To a large degree it depends upon the talent of the designer. Randy Duke and Kevin Hall are two of our success stories. Other students are doing well but are not necessarily famous yet.
“A lot of them do work for someone else. I would say 96% of the students who graduate from FIDM are placed in jobs for which they’ve been trained.”
Along with the Sherman Oaks campus, the school has branches in Los Angeles and Orange County. Student enrollment varies between 150 to 200 a year. And the cost? It isn’t cheap.
“Yes, the school is expensive,” Bremer said. “It’s from $8,000 a year, depending on your major. But that includes all of your books and materials.”
And competition, even at the student level, is also steep.
“It’s really cutthroat, just like the industry,” said Vega, who works as a sample cutter at Candy Kiss, a children’s clothing store in Sun Valley.
“The competitiveness between students does exist,” Bremer said. “But that comes with any field where you want to succeed. If you don’t have that kind of spirit, you’re not going to make it.”
Vega’s job as a sample cutter--someone who essentially cuts out sample garments--doesn’t offer much challenge to her creativity, but she plans to stay with it after her graduation to gain practical and business experience. Ultimately, she hopes to open a boutique featuring her own line of clothing.
“Like everyone else, I want to do my own thing,” she said. “I might want to go into lingerie or leather, something totally different from what I’m doing now.”
