Davy Yang, 21, peers at the models sashaying down the Otis College runway in his carefully wrought designs -- an arresting yellow swimsuit that swirls on the hipbone with fabric trailing down the back, and a blue jumpsuit with an eye-catching rust-colored scarf -- garments that took two full semesters of sketching, stitching and adjusting to perfect.
Squinting through a crack in the wall backstage, Yang, a junior in the college's grueling fashion design program, critiques his work, aloof as a master couturier. "I was a little disappointed," he says afterward. In fact, he's always a little disappointed -- such is life in fashion, apparently.
"Every fashion designer is on this pursuit of perfection," says the waifish Yang, who describes his designs -- and his own personality -- as "dramatic." "I don't know if it happens in other fields as well, but I think in fashion you never stop. There's never a point when you're done, and it's perfect."
There is a point, though, when the "imperfect" student work honed over many months is paraded down a catwalk and judged in a contest with "jump-start a new career" as its prize. The lead-up to the big event is the show Yang is watching on April 9, a revue of nearly 200 looks that are sized up by industry professionals, many of them Otis alumni, then winnowed to the 175 pieces that will be shown at a scholarship benefit gala Saturday at the Beverly Hilton hotel.
That final show -- the school bills it as "the biggest runway show in Los Angeles" -- is attended by fashionistas, media moguls and Hollywood starlets, and its culmination is the presentation of the Silver Thimble Award, the Otis College of Art and Design's equivalent of an Oscar, to a handful of top students.
The competition is intense, and this year's seniors, weeks away from entering the least favorable job market in decades, are keenly aware that a Silver Thimble -- or even a noteworthy garment in the show -- could vastly improve their chances of scoring that all-important first job. In the last three years, John Varvatos, Nike and Monique Lhuillier have all hired top-ranking students to become assistant designers.
Tough love
If it all sounds a bit like "Project Runway," Otis fashion department chair Rosemary Brantley wouldn't disagree. In fact, in the program, "every day feels like 'Project Runway,' " she says. Rejection, criticism, creative compromise, beleaguered budgets -- woes that all designers must face in the real world -- are part of each student's daily diet. And the ones who make it through the four intense undergrad years (many drop out, overwhelmed by the workload) emerge resilient and primed for an increasingly unforgiving fashion industry.
Like apprentice Navy Seals armed with sewing machines, the survivors seem thicker-skinned than most, and unburdened by glamorous illusions about what life as a fashion designer is really about.
Brantley, Otis' salt-of-the-earth matriarch and resident "Tim Gunn," believes a little tough love goes a long way in preparing her charges for the challenges ahead, making them ready for jobs as assistant designers -- rather than interns -- immediately upon graduation.
Underpinning this "real world" style of education is Otis' mentor program, which has students spending much of their junior and senior years constructing a handful of garments under the guidance of high-profile industry gurus, visiting wizards who have included Isaac Mizrahi, Bob Mackie, Francisco Costa, Varvatos and Isabel Toledo.
This year's mentors are typically stellar -- Lhuillier, Badgley Mischka and Todd Oldham are among them, as are designers from multimillion-dollar brands such as Cosabella, Hurley, Anthropologie and Ed Hardy. Each gives the students an assignment -- broadly, to create looks that fit the mentor's aesthetic -- and the fledgling designers have until showtime to complete it. "The students have a very unnatural relationship with these garments," Brantley says. "They have literally used their rent money to buy their fabric. Often, they've been carrying around these dresses and living with them."
Senior Ila Erickson, 22, was so involved with her garments that the servers at her local bar expressed surprise when she didn't come in holding one of her Monique Lhuillier or Alabama Chanin projects. "It's nonstop," says the flame-haired, soft-spoken Erickson, who grew up on a ranch in Montana and plans to have her own line one day.
Her Monique Lhuillier garment, a complex 1940s-inspired gown made of thin, hand-sewn strips, individually draped, drew nods of approval from the audience at the April 9 show. "Doing the show put us all under lots of pressure, but it's great motivation to do the work and meet the deadlines," she says. And working on one or two big garments as opposed to several smaller projects was beneficial, she adds. "You really learn," she says. "You become completely immersed in the process, and are forced to learn every step in how something comes together."
