Beating out college students, Shawnee senior Isabella DiPietro wins Top Student Designer award at Atlantic City Fashion Week.
Fashion runs in the family.
“My grandma was a fashion designer, and she taught me how to sew,” said Isabella DiPietro, a senior at Shawnee High School who recently won an award for Top Student Designer at Atlantic City Fashion Week. She beat out mostly college students.
DiPietro wasn’t expecting the award in the least. She didn’t even tell her friends and family it was a competition, thinking she probably wouldn’t win anyway.
“I was just very very surprised,” she said. “It definitely meant a lot.”
The award came with some publicity to boot. She got her name on the cover of Belle Femme magazine, which featured a short Q and A on the inside about herself.
The event lasted the entire second full week of September and took place at the Showboat Hotel in Atlantic City.
DiPietro’s winning designs featured green and black lace and satin.
“Everything had beads on them inspired by the jungle and the forest,” she said.
DiPietro’s dream job is to have her own fashion brand, just like her grandma did.
“But I would also love working under a luxury brand like Gucci, Valentino — any of the Italian brands,” she said.
DiPietro’s grandmother, Barbara Kates, was the owner of Barbara Kates designs, which was an upscale brand of women’s lace clothing back in the day.
As for DiPietro, she’s still not sure what type of clothing she wants to specialize in.
“Maybe streetwear or luxury and evening wear,” she said.
DiPietro has been making fashion sketches since she was 5 years old. With help from her grandma, who passed away in 2014, DiPietro sewed her first creation when she was in fourth grade, which was a handbag.
Ever since, she has invested almost all of her extra time toward sketching out new ideas and creating them. She even has a part-time job working at Cattell’s Sew & Vac in Medford.
The process, she said, is more arduous than you might think. First, ideas have to be sketched out, and then before you actually sew the designs together with expensive fabrics, you have to sew them with cheap fabric to make sure you don’t waste all of your good material.
“It’s really time consuming,” she said.
For this reason, she usually has to deny her friends’ requests to make them clothes.
“I wish I had the time,” she said. “But I don’t have the time to make things to be able to sell them.”
Her plans post-high school are to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan, as long as she’s accepted.
“It puts you in the center of New York City and has really great internship opportunities,” she said. “You can take very advanced classes there, and a lot of teachers are from the field.”
It takes fashion and arts schools a little bit longer to hand out acceptance letters — mostly because they have to go through portfolios of students’ work. It’s not as simple as applying to most colleges, DiPietro said, because getting in isn’t just about your GPA and what clubs you participated in.
