Fashion Design was a new course that started in the 2022-2023 academic year as an option for one of the courses under the umbrella of Family and Consumer Sciences (FACS). FACS teacher Shelbi Loupe taught the course where students worked in the sewing room next to her classroom.
“[Fashion] has always impacted my life especially because I have a lot of students that are interested in fashion design,” Loupe said. “Sometimes they push me and help me learn even more things about fashion that I didn’t know about. This encourages me to keep learning.”
For the students taking the course, fashion was a way to express their emotions or to show how they felt. Being a student in a fashion design class offered a fun way to discover one’s style, spend time on a new style or even find one’s personality based on their fashion style. Freshman Neveah Cotton used her fashion sense to reflect her personality.
“Fashion is what makes me, me,” Cotton said. “My style is how I express myself.”
Without fashion, a lot of people wouldn’t know how to express themselves. Fashion offered a way to show students’ inner thoughts. Freshman Yelitza Chavez Chavez used fashion to express how she felt.
“I mean, it’s just kind of the way I express myself,” Chavez Chavez said. “That’s how I want to present myself.”
Charvez Chavez expressed and presented herself by how she dressed. She believed that fashion was not just about feeling good in what she was wearing, but about feeling comfortable in her clothes.
“Mainly [I express myself] with my makeup and shoes because I don’t really have a lot of stuff I try out. But usually I just express myself with makeup. I have a lot of makeup because in my free time I like to cosplay so I express something like shoes because I have so many platforms,” Clem said.
Even at a young age, sophomore Kylee Clem found fashion and liked it. Clem looked for a fashion style by playing with their clothes, like ripping T-shirts or just getting stylistic advice from their mom and family.
“I started discovering and paying attention to my outfits and how I dressed when I started taking off the bright yellow hoodies and putting on black shirts,” Clem said. “I think the first ever punk-ish outfit I had was when I wore black skinny jeans. I’d rip to the knees. My favorite black converse, and one of my mom’s ACDC shirts. And that’s what I think, started it because I put that off and it felt so confident.”