An Amboy teen’s interest in pushing the boundaries and what is considered normal in fashion has paid dividends with a $20,000 Portland Fashion Institute scholarship
Battle Ground River Homelink graduate Aidan Clause will attend the fashion institute for two years to earn an associate degree because of his transformational clothing. Clause also attended the Cascadia Technical Academy’s fashion program, which he said contributed greatly to earning the scholarship.
“With getting the scholarship, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Cascadia,” he said. “The skills that I learned there helped me incredibly with that. But the scholarship itself, like the meat and potatoes of it, was a three-minute video that I had to craft up and just talking about what I think about fashion and then showcasing my designs.”
To earn his scholarship, Clause showed off his transformational clothing items on stage in a fashion show. From pants that can widen and change length to a shirt that becomes a skirt to a tote bag that turns into a trench coat, his designs impressed the crowd.
“So the big one, I called it the star of the show, were these pants that I made, and the whole concept of my fashion show was centered around finding creative ways to make modular clothing and just have a very utilitarian, but still kind of costumey and like a bit excessive [design] because it’s still fashion at the end of the day,” Clause said. “These pants have zippers down the front of the legs [so] you can widen the already-wide leg, and then the main thing that’s kind of the interesting part about them is they have this hook that you can alter the length of the leg by hooking the pants up higher.”
📷credit The Reflector