The Designer Series: Kelly Su (Part 1)
4 Min. Read | The Designer Series | A.M.
KELLY SU
CAMI&TANK | COMPOSURE BY KELLY
Kelly was born in South Korea to a military family. She spent her formative years in Anchorage, Alaska. The only daughter amongst nine brothers, she vividly remembers trodding around in the mud and tundra whilst accompanying her family on hunting trips in the Alaskan wilderness. “My brothers from Alaska, they're big hunters. They would hunt grizzly bears. Yeah, it wasn't like little hunting. They would hunt bears.”
“GROWING UP IN AN ASIAN HOUSEHOLD, FASHION DESIGN OR ARTISTS—THAT JUST WASN’T A REAL CAREER.”
“I grew up as a big tomboy,” she reluctantly confesses while maintaining her love and admiration for her siblings. Her mother tried to create an image for her that was very feminine, choosing vibrant colors and expensive textiles. But Kelly’s color palette was always monochromatic, perhaps as much an intrinsic motivation as it was a reaction to extrinsic factors.
Yet despite the ruggedness and complexities of her masculine upbringing, Kelly’s interests in fashion became self-evident. She began sketching silhouettes, and from there, evolved into designing and fabricating wardrobe for her dolls out of anything she could find.
She recalls receiving a cashmere sweater as a gift from her mother, which she then cut to pieces and repurposed. And while she would not go into detail, the severity of her mother’s reaction is still clearly evident in Kelly’s hemmed in response.
Although fashion design was the subject of deep contention within her family, Kelly recalls her mother being an elegant woman whose tastes in fashion were rich and colorful and deeply feminine—characteristics Kelly would spend the remainder of her formative years rebelling against.
While her influences remained broad, it was the long Alaskan winter seasons and short daylight hours that served to inform her creative intuition, which can be most readily seen in the monochromatic and lightly textured fabric selections that comprise her current collections.
HIGH SCHOOL
Kelly began her fashion career at Nordstrom Anchorage. “I actually started woking as a fragrance model for Nordstrom when I was in High School,” she remembers, recalling her first exposure to Chanel as a source of inspiration.
It was there she secretly plotted her next steps toward a formal fashion education. Her plan was simple: She would have to leave her home in Anchorage on her own—something she had never done before—and move to large city with a thriving fashion scene.
And the first choice was obvious: New York. She dreamed of attending the renowned Parsons School of Design in Lower Manhattan where she would gain a world-class education and then a job working for Donna Karan before leaving to start her own international fashion brand. But New York has an intimidating reputation, and does not suffer naïvety lightly. And fortunately for her, there was another option.
“I asked my manager at the time…if I moved to Seattle—I know that there’s a flagship store there—can I get relocated?” She kindly agreed. And so it was at the age of 19 that Kelly left for Seattle to pursue her dream of becoming a fashion designer.
COLLEGE
She landed at the Art Institute of Seattle where the crucible of education would test her resolve. Creative by nature, Kelly would confront both her great difficulty with, and finally, her incredible gratitude for the Institute’s emphasis on developing technical skills and mastery.
“YOU CAN’T JUST SKETCH SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL, CREATE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL AND HOPE THAT IT’LL JUST COME TO LIFE.”
“The Art Institute [was] really good at teaching me that, the technical side, which I wasn’t even thinking about at the time.” It’s not enough to be creative, she asserts. “You have to have the vision to start from the beginning [and technically follow through] to the end.”
RUNWAY
The first fashion show experience came her senior year at the Art Institute. With broad influences from Taoism and Zen Buddhism, her first collection might be described as a personal journey of self discovery. It was a time of diverse reflection in Seattle, as the post-grunge fashion scene gave way to a post-grunge alternative music scene. Capitol Hill still had a thriving arts community and Instagram was a decade away. Though flannel had never left—and likely never will—one thing remained. Seattle was becoming a melting pot where things seemed to melt together.
One of her more memorable pieces from that collection was a kimono made from polar fleece, where she found a balance between elegance and utilitarianism. But the collection was inconsistent. So her second would feature elements with a decidedly more feminine approach. And it was the finale at her second runway event that truly stole the show.
“I remember my finale, my last piece that I had out there…I needed a ‘wow’ piece because I knew I was going last.” Kelly tilts her head to one side as she recalls more in depth, raising and lowering her arms with increasing intensity and precision, as a conductor would leading a symphony. She recounts creating a mesh see-through dress with a fitted silhouette to which she affixed hundreds of flower petals with show stopping results.
“I remember someone did offer to buy that at the show, but I kept it…They gave us a CD of our fashion show and I’m, like, sharing it with everybody. That was exciting. That’s when I was like, yeah, I can call myself a designer.”
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