Tracey Lewis

Excerpts from an Interview with the Designer

Recorded on: March 27 2023

Tell me about your collection!

I originally had a completely different plan. I had been planning since December, before the semester started, and then I had a dream where in my dream, it was telling me to not do what I had originally done, and to do a whole, like 180 of what I was planning on doing. So that was a moment in itself because I ended up changing my mood board, my trend board. I ended up changing everything that I was planning on doing. 

But I love the concept that I have now. It’s basically just feeling the empowerment of black women. All of my models are black and I'm also walking the show too, and I want to, through my collection, put an emphasis on how powerful black women are in their own bodies and with themselves, and how other people can see that, through my collection. Red is a powerful color in my opinion, so red is throughout my entire collection. I have a lot of different shapes and silhouettes going on with my dresses as well as two jumpsuits that I'm making.

They're all made out of lace, which is just really beautiful in my opinion. And of course, black women are very beautiful. So I wanna show how beautiful we all are, coming together through this collection.

I just feel like there's been so much, for lack of a better word, resistance, and negativity that the black community in general has been through in the past few years, especially black women, we're always in the back end of things. So I really wanted this collection to showcase how amazing black women are and what they can do. Especially me being a black woman, making this collection. I want to show how much I can do. I want to show how much all of my models can bring parts of themselves into this collection as they're walking down the runway. I want them to feel beautiful just as much as I want to make beautiful garments. 

What challenges have you been facing?

The way that I've recently been working, I just, as I've been working and developing my collection, I just keep changing things as I work. That's been a struggle because it's resulted in some of my mockups and things not being on time, not being turned in on time. They're done now. I just have so many ideas running in my mind at one time. When I feel like I want to switch something up at that moment, I just switch it. It’s a good thing that I can think on my feet really fast. It's also been pretty hard to keep up. It's been a little more difficult to try to keep up with deadlines and stuff like that, but by show day, it'll be fine. 

How do you balance creating for an audience and creating for yourself?

I knew for this collection, I really wanted to put the emphasis on what I wanted to make, to show to the audience. That's the biggest thing for me. I'm very confident in myself with my skills and how the collection's going to look on show day, that no matter what I put out, the audience is going to love it anyway. That’s been my attitude the whole time. I just know myself and I know that this collection - it's my baby - it's gonna be amazing come show day. So I'm excited for everybody to see what I've been doing.