As a longtime runner and a sophomore VCUarts fashion design major, Alice Babashak has her eye on a specific career path: footwear design.
“This combination of kinesiology and art meet and find this balance of function and utility,” she says, “but it’s also something that people really want to buy and use.”
Babashak’s experience on the track, plus a personal interest in anatomy, taught her plenty about how a body moves and responds. But she knew she had more to learn more about how fabrics operate.
That’s what led her to spend a summer at Piece and Co., a New York-based textile designer, with the help of an internship support grant from VCUarts.
Working in an open office with a small staff, Babashak had a chance to see all facets of the production process. Sitting at her desk, she could hear the sales and marketing team talking to designers about how to market a product, or asking the creative director about design directions. She watched as Piece and Co.’s CEO hashed out the details of opening a new office. And she saw the product development team decide how their designs would carry over into a new home collection.
“It was a really dynamic group, as far as their growth and how these three or four people that met in a small office every day expanded this operation into a pretty successful business,” she says. “The most beneficial thing was experiencing how a designer interacts with other departments—how what you design goes through next steps and is altered to meet a client’s needs.”
It was Piece and Co.’s bigger mission, though, that really drew Babashak in. Piece and Co. sources environmentally and socially responsible fabrics from artisans around the world in an effort to give smaller communities a way to compete in the global marketplace.
“Products have to do more than just be good or look nice—they have to have a story behind them,” she says. “At Piece and Co., their story wasn’t just, ‘We make this product and we sell it to people.’ They care about the people that they connected with and were proud to label the different standards that they upheld.”
Now that Babashak is back at VCUarts, her fashion classes have added nuance.
“I can read a chapter about pattern-making construction, or take notes about how different pencil hardnesses affect illustrations,” she says. “But to see that carried out in a real-world experience was exhilarating and gave me this new excitement.”
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