Bay Area’s fashion design students nip and tuck their collections from home

Yesenia Villasenor's new Zoom backdrop features a rack full of clothes and a dress form draped in dreamy white fabric: a reminder of her latest work, and also the weirdest semester finale ever.

In March, the California College of the Arts fashion student began creating her capstone collection in St Helena, where her parents live and own a restaurant. "We were taking turns helping out with takeout and working at school, and whenever we had time I'd grab one of my two sisters and fit things on her," Villasenor says. Last week she presented the collection, a series of frayed, draped and layered female garments, to jurors — over Zoom.

For the Class of 2020, graduation has been something of a letdown, a commencement into an uncertain future, notable only for its lack of graduation rites. The disruptions have been especially painful for San Francisco's fashion design hopefuls. The main casualty: The graduate fashion show, with its runways, cramped dressing rooms, fabrics swishing, the pure energy and adrenaline. It's a dazzling hour, one students begin fantasizing about as soon as they enroll.

But with loss came the need to pivot, innovate and reinvent the process. With scrappiness, fabric scraps, and healthy doses of DIY and family support, some students say they found a new sense of freedom while sheltering in place.

The mad dash to finish graduate collections began soon after the shelter-in-place order came down in March, forcing the city's design schools to move their classes online. For Academy of Art University and College of the Arts students, who are used to working on graduate collections at their school's studios accompanied by peers and instructors, working remotely might have seemed impossible at first. What about the dress forms, the printing and cutting equipment, the extra sets of knowing eyes and hands to call out a crooked stitch or point out nuances of fabric movement and draping? What about space to host piles upon piles of fabric?

But the students found ways to make do. Makayla Godden, finishing a bachelor of fine arts degree in textile design at Academy of Art, set up a screen printing studio, including screens she constructed herself in her parents' backyard in the Central Valley. College of the Arts fashion design graduate Noah Dubin, who's sheltering with his wife and 5-month old baby, journeyed to San Jose from San Francisco's Mission District — Muni, BART, Caltrain — to borrow a 20-pound leather sewing machine, and then lugged it back up. Academy of Art textile design graduate Donovan Smith turned one of the bathrooms in his dorm room into a fabric dyeing station. "It got smelly and messy pretty quickly," he says. (Smith's dormmates went home due to COVID-19.)

Some academy students moved operations to their dorm room entirely. Some, like Yesenia, went back to their parents' homes, surprising their families with fabric swatches and creative chaos. It wasn't "normal" but it certainly wasn't mundane. Tough decisions were made, collections were altered.

For her collection, academy senior Aishwarya Gajare used crochet to create asymmetrical, voluminous and highly textured garments that transcend gender or occasion. Before the pandemic, Gajare had experimented with some of the knitwear machines at school, but she "moved on to crochet so I found it easier to work from home."

Aptly, her mission statement has to do with examining the fashion industry's reliance on heavy machinery and mass-production. For most of the time, she had to work on the floor of the two-bedroom SoMa apartment she shares with her brother; some pieces, when laid out, took up the entire bedroom. "I've had to go the abstract route," she laughs. Her brother has never seen so much of her at home — or been so surprised: He hadn't been aware of his sister's crafting skills.

Many students' collections became family matters. While Gajare bonded with her brother over the design progress ("He's an architect, and I guess we have similarities in our construction process," she says), Villasenor turned to her siblings for modeling services, for the lack of actual fitting sessions. Unusual models were certainly a trend this year, as students fit the clothes on themselves, dressed their boyfriends in female garments, and met with the occasional classmate on the street to do a quick fitting — Gajare had met with Smith, her neighbor and friend, under his dorm, bringing two garments at a time.

Villasenor's project was, in hindsight, perfectly suitable for at-home production. Her collection, conceived as a protest against fast garment production and textile waste, used scrap fabric collaged together. With its interesting textures, the collection would have been better viewed live, not through the flat screen, Villasenor says. "It could have been interesting to see it on the runway, too," she sighs.

Instead, there's the online showcase. College of the Arts built a special website for the 2020 graduates, displaying their work as well as inspirations. At Academy of Art, the annual online showcase has been expanded and supplemented with video and student-conducted photo shoots. There's also a hint at a special presentation that's yet to come, perhaps in a virtual format. Simon Ungless, executive director at the academy's School of Fashion, believes that this way, the students' collections will be exposed to even more eyeballs. "I don't believe in fashion shows anymore; there are too many shows and they're not realistic," Ungless says. "People want to see things digitally. We can work in a traditional way through modern technology."

The traditional in-person collection reviews, taking place on Zoom this time, were also ripe with opportunity, Ungless says. At College of the Arts, students' collections were viewed by people who wouldn't have been able to attend otherwise, such as Sara Kozlowski, director of education and professional development at Council of Fashion Designers of America. At Academy of Art, the legendary writer Suzy Menkes joined remotely.

Ungless believes that all the adaptations and innovations have sped up the learning process: "It might sound really crazy, but in the process of self-learning and editing, students have gone from a student to a designer in a maturing curve that was accelerated," he says.

Finding a job and surviving in the fashion world is notoriously tough, and the pandemic won't make it any easier. But whatever comes next, the Class of 2020 may be better prepared than any of their alumni were. After carrying borrowed dress forms for blocks, hauling machinery on public transport, cutting patterns on the floor and screen-printing in their parents' backyard, one imagines — or hopes — that they will be ready for almost anything.

Flora Tsapovsky is a freelance writer. Email culture@sfchronicle.com

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