What Does it Take to Be A Fashion Designer?

Click for more: http://ww2.kqed.org/artschool/ Oakland high school student Zachary Fernandez made it to the finals on the first season of Project Runway Junior, then headed straight back to Oakland School of the Arts to continue his education as a designer. His newest collection, Kathmandu, was inspired by recovery efforts in Nepal after the devastating 2015 earthquake. Art School followed Fernandez's process as he sketched, sourced fabric, and designed his new project, revealed at a culminating fashion show in spring 2016. Hi, my name is Zachary Fernandez and I'm currently a fashion student. So I am starting my Kathmandu 2016 collection. My collection's gonna be debuting at my school fashion show, and so I have little under seven weeks to get this all put together. So our school assignment was to pick a city that we wanted to be inspired by for this collection. I ended with Kathmandu, Nepal, all of the trouble that they went through last year was really inspiring and I was able to take those ideas of imbalance and the destruction of culture and apply that to this new collection. These are the pieces that I ended up designing. They're ever-changing and they kind of just are always in flux. My sketching process involves a lot of images, a lot of mixed medias, I like to do collages, watercolors, acrylic paste, it's a real reflection of what my mind looks like. Here you have the final sketches that I've done. The sketching process for me is really a major step between just ideas and kind of this fantasy world that I've created in my mind to really functional wearable pieces. Fabric sourcing is one of my favorite things to do. It's really like a group activity, like meet a couple of friends, we'll just go, we'll explore the city, we'll get inspiration. So I'm looking for like a very pale blue that's almost like very silverish, and then I'm gonna be looking for a very deep, rust orange color. Okay, so I need to find this, but more grayish blue. The fabric stor