Sabrina Baladad-Perez

I was meant to be a designer

I always knew that I would be a fashion designer. When I was a little girl, my two older cousins and I would spend hours upon hours designing and sketching clothes. Movies were our inspiration. We watched the characters with wide eyes, taking in all of the beautiful colors of the garments on the big screen. But as we grew older, we were constantly told that being a fashion designer wasn’t a “real job” and that the fashion world is too competitive, too cutthroat to ever claim success for yourself. Slowly, as elementary idealism turned into adolescent cynicism, the thought of becoming a fashion designer became a distant childhood fantasy for my cousinsーtheir dreams abandoned to the woes and worries of the “real-world.” I, however, could never lose sight of the original aspiration. The light of fashion, the allure to the art of it all, never faded from my eyes. With every colorful shoe that walked down the runway, avante garde silhouette that framed a magazine cover, and draped fabric adorning a mannequin I saw, the more entranced with fashion I became.