HOMETOWN: I'm from California; my family is from Korea.
COLLECTION: My visual inspiration came from flowers, especially at my grandfather's funeral in Korea. They had a picture of my grandfather's face surrounded by chrysanthemum flowers, and that's the image I was really inspired by. I draped my version of chrysanthemum flowers on the form. It's slowly consuming the person.
Ka Brianna Lee
NAME: Noah Berch
AGE: 23
HOMETOWN: Atlanta, Georgia
COLLECTION: I was inspired by a time in history when things were changing inside and outside the home in the 1960s. [For] women, their husbands were coming back from war, and the government and propaganda was saying, "Be the wife, be the mother," but they also started to realize they had so much more to go for them. The title of the collection is "Real Gone," which refers to a term I found while researching, "real gone cat," which referred to someone who walked to their own beat and did their own thing. I took apron as an inspiration of construction.
NAME: Erato Hadjiyianni
AGE: 22
HOMETOWN: Cyprus
COLLECTION: I looked at a lot of painters and how they portrayed abstract expressionism, and I tried to mimic that by collaging my fabric in the way you collage paper.
NAME: Andrea Dyes
HOMETOWN: Conifer, Colorado
COLLECTION: It's looking at how the body is an inherently flawed object. I was looking at a lot of images from artists like Mario Sorrenti, Hans Bellmer, Etienne Gros—just looking at different body parts, wrinkles, extensions of the body, things like cellulite. A lot of it is latex and foam.
NAME: Paul Wu
AGE: 23
HOMETOWN: East Brunswick, New Jersey
COLLECTION: My inspiration is based on my identity as a gay Asian American living in the suburbs of New Jersey. There are a lot of references to school and frustration—ripping paper. I tried to emulate grit paper. I bonded a lot of tyvec and I used a lot of bonding techniques. I made knits and bonded them on shirting. It's personal but also wearable.
Patamon Khoman
JiWoen Hong
NAME: Elizabeth Hilfiger
AGE: 22
HOMETOWN: Greenwich, Connecticut
COLLECTION: The inspiration was packaging and the idea of separates—different containers of water bottles, eraser packages, and interpreting those into sportswear with a mix of fast and traditional material and techniques. It kind of evolved into paper sculptures that I made, and then literally putting them into clothing.
