So, You Really Want To Be A Fashion Designer ..
By Allison Covington

Well, I never did. Not when I was a little girl, at least. I was a typical tomboy - hunting down salamanders in the yard, playing in the dirt, and looking for snakes under rocks. I haven’t changed. Fashion design is my alter ego. I guess there was a small foreshadowing of my frenetic inclination to create when I sewed my finger in the sewing machine at age 12. Hopefully, you only do that once.

My mother had this small pleather (virgin Naugahyde) chest of drawers with the most amazing “quarters” of fabric, all 70’s style with wide stripes in shades of lemon yellow, lime and kelly green. Large polka dots in shades of yellow, green, and fuchsia, sprinkled on an orange backdrop. A small decorative metal tin filled with as many different buttons as there were stars. So she let me try the machine. I learned to thread the monster and sewed a couple of straight lines. By that time, my Mom was out of patience and had somewhere to be. She put the cover on the machine and uttered strict words, “Don’t touch the machine while I’m out.”

Of course, what was the first thing I did? Just like the little seamstress soon-to-be fashion designer I was, I went straight down there, opened the machine back up, and proceeded to make my finger part of my ‘project’. I ran to the neighbor’s house, only to then have my Mom arrive home to an empty house with no note. Needless to say, this was a painful start to an even more painful process of becoming a fashion designer.

And, ironically enough, the whole story comes back full circle to pleather. There I was in college… no, not for fashion design, but a liberal arts education. I had taken on a part-time job working for a VW repair shop. I did everything - drove stranded customers home after dropping off their autos, turned engines into spare parts, cleaned up oil spills .. whatever they asked. One day, my sexist male chauvinist boss told me to, “head over to Fabric Depot and buy some pleather because we need to make a back shelf for that Kharmann Ghia.” Well, let’s just say that Fabric Depot was like my mother’s pleather chest of drawers times 1000, and I was a wide-eyed kid in a Naugahyde candy shop. I looked at my once-sewn finger and immediately signed up for sewing lessons.

So, the first day of class arrived, only, work ended at six, and class began at six. Not much was happening at work, so I politely asked if I could leave early to make it to class on time. “NO, you cannot leave early, and if you ask to leave early again, then you’re fired.” Wrong answer. “I won’t ask to leave early again, because I QUIT!” I have never worked for anyone else since.

Those were my first rocky steps towards becoming a fashion designer – not the usual route of sewing my own clothes in middle school, making costumes for the high school play, or creating a line of doll clothes, my path started with sewn body parts and fake leather Karmann Ghia seat backs. Sweet destiny? Apparently so. Who would have thought I’d be where I am today, owner of the rising design house of Amai Unmei. Perhaps my sewing teacher? I would be working on four projects per class while everyone else worked on one project per four classes. I may not have gone to fashion school, but a liberal arts degree and a job as a Volkswagon mechanic taught me one thing: how to get a plethora of stuff done when the you-know-what hits the fan.