Twakelee Gborkorquelli’s passion for fashion took root when she was a little girl in Liberia watching her mother and aunt sew duvets. Before long she was crocheting dresses for her Barbies. Today the Textiles, Fashion Merchandising and Design (TMD) major can whip up a dress in two hours and has more than nine outfits and three collections in her portfolio. She’s never seen herself doing anything but fashion design.
“I’ve been cutting fabric for myself for so long I don’t need to measure. I do everything by eye,” Twakelee says. Her designs, which include wedding gowns, casual evening wear, and dresses, were a highlight in URI’s 11th annual April fashion gala. Her candy-inspired “Starburst,’’ an explosion of green, pink, and red, helped her earn a $1,000 undergraduate research grant to create fashions for submission to an International Textiles and Apparel Association event.
Young people tend to think that in fashion, you’re either a designer or a buyer. But there is a wide range of fashion careers that our program prepares you for. ~Professor Linda Welters
When she graduates in 2015, Twakelee hopes to work for Balmain, a high-end Parisian fashion house. If that doesn’t happen, she’ll knock on the doors of New York apparel companies.
You might think someone with such big fashion aspirations would have attended a design school, but Twakelee chose URI’s TMD program for its mix of design, marketing, and business coursework, which prepares grads for all aspects of the highly competitive fashion industry.
“Young people tend to think that in fashion, you’re either a designer or a buyer. But there is a wide range of fashion careers that our program prepares you for,” said Professor Linda Welters, TMD co-chair.
On the marketing side of fashion, our Textile Marketing majors take a third of their classes alongside business majors, studying market research, consumer behavior, business law, and sales. It’s a partnership that’s worked well for Amanda Miller ’08, who is a vice president of The Trump Organization and involved with Ivanka Trump’s fashion line.
Studying the science behind textiles opens doors to possibilities that extend beyond the runway. For example, inside URI’s textile testing lab, students work with Professor Martin Bide, an internationally renowned textile chemist who is developing a synthetic artery and a wound dressing that combines infection resistance with blood clotting agents.
And when the URI women’s rowing team competed in England’s famed Henley Women’s Regatta, TMD students in Professor Karl Aspelund’s classes researched Henley history, culture, and fashion to design the team uniforms, which were produced by fashion giant Jones of New York, whose CEO is URI grad Wes Card ’70.
Our TMD students and graduates are often featured in StyleWeek Northeast, a showcase of emerging designers. And a few, like Makara Chan ’10, have made it to StyleWeek’s production team.
So we’re quite sure that Tawakelee’s big ideas for her fashion career are not the least bit too big for her—or for any of our talented TMD grads.
Pictured above: URI student Twakelee Gborkorquelli modeling her own dress design in the fashion studio.
Related Links:
Our TMD Grads: where they are today
April fashion show at URI to highlight students’ design, talent, hard work
There’s more to fabric than fashion