AUDIENCE PICK
Designer: Grace DuVal
Title: DON’T PANIC – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Grace DuVal is “a wearable artist/designer/photographer/traveler/never-ending do-er of many things” currently living in Chicago, Illinois. Originally from a tiny town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, from the earliest age she spent her spare time creating and imagining endless worlds and possibilities. Both of her parents are writers and artists themselves, so the doors to a creative universe were always open to Grace. When she discovered her mom’s sewing machine at the age of twelve and realized she could make whatever she wanted, she was hooked. “I’ve never found anything I love quite as much as sitting down in front of a sewing machine and making something extraordinary,” she says. “From there I just couldn’t stop, I had so many ideas in my head. I just kept working and sewing and messing up and trying again and getting better and better. The things I made got more complex and challenging and weird as the years went on. And that’s how I came to love fashion. It gave me the power to physically bring my dreams to life.”
Working in fashion for over a decade now, Grace started off in high school transforming old thrift store clothing into crazy new creations. Her sewing foundations were established by working in a costume shop after school, where she learned the basics of hand sewing and using store-bought patterns. She received her Bachelor’s degree in 2010 from the School of the Art Institute, where she majored in Sculpture and minored in Fashion Design. She has since worked in theater companies across America and with fashion design companies around the world. She works independently to create custom, one-of-a-kind fashion pieces for herself and for private clients. “I would call myself more of a wearable artist than strictly a fashion designer,” she says. “I am, above all, inspired by non-traditional materials and sculptural forms. I believe the body is a foundation that garments can be built upon, and I am constantly inspired to see how the body can be transformed through the shapes and forms that garments can take. I prefer to choose my materials from thrift shops and hardware stores instead of fabric shops. I find so much excitement in imagining new possibilities for trash, discarded materials, and things that you would never imagine could become a beautiful garment.”
Photo: Mark Edwards