Young artists named finalists in fashion competition

Rigdon Hendricks saw the ocean in a way he hadn’t before this spring break. He was visiting Carlsbad, Calif. when the variation in the color of the water jumped out in a new way.

Those reflections of the shades of the ocean inspired his design for Birmingham Fashion Week’s Rising Design Star competition. The competition charges high school and middle school students with designing and creating garments out of unconventional materials.

The top of the dress Rigdon designed displays lighter colors like those of the top of the ocean, while the bottom is darker and more varied. To create the design, Rigdon hand-cut paint chips into rigid triangles and lined them on a skeleton of chicken wire and duct tape. The sharp edges in the chips and the spikes on the top and bottom represent a reimagined ocean with sharp edges instead of smooth waves.

For an accent at the waist, he used Mod Podge to create a sand belt with a starfish buckle and marble studs.

This was Rigdon’s first time to design or create a garment, but he has long enjoyed drawing and wants to major in art and animation in college.

Rigdon, a seventh-grader who is homeschooled, and two other Homewood students were among 40 finalists for the competition who displayed their anything-but-cloth garments at the Birmingham Museum of Art in April. Thirty semifinalists’ designs will be modeled on the runway during Birmingham Fashion Week on Thursday and Friday, April 24 and 25. The final 16 designs will take the runway on Saturday, the final evening of Fashion Week.

Homewood Middle School eighth-grader Chloe Miller’s dress design was inspired by advertisements in magazines. She deliberately sought out ads where she said the models looked digitally altered and unrealistic in an effort to redeem them through her design.

“You should love you for yourself,” she said. “You shouldn’t hate your body because you can’t change it.”

The piece in the front center of the dress is a face made of makeup, which represents how she thinks many girls think they must look to be accepted.

Another favorite piece of the dress for Chloe is a face she felt looked particularly digitally enhanced, which she covered with part of another ad that read, “I will outlast fear.”

To create the design, Chloe used plastic wrap and sculpting wire as a base before hot-gluing on pieces of the ads and applying a layer of glitter.

The final element on the dress was a duct tape trim that Chloe said represents the silver lining her dress finds in digitally edited ads, which she said are not realistic at all.

Fellow eighth-grader Isabelle Estes, who attends Spring Valley School, drew from an idea she saw on TV show Project Runway where the contestants ironed Solo cups.

Isabelle found that the trick didn’t work as well for her, but she stuck with the cup idea and cut them into pieces to glue to the bodice of her dress.

To complete the design, she dyed yarn in coordinating blue and purple hues and arranged them into swirls for the designs’ skirt. The final piece of the garment was a zipper down the back of the dress.

Isabelle said her grandmother has shown her how to sew, but she prefers to craft her garments.

For more information on Birmingham Fashion Week, visit bhamfashionweek.com.