I came to UC/DAAP in the autumn of 1993 at the request of the head of the Fashion division. She waved at the bloodbath between Parsons, FIT, her Fashion program at DAAP & RISD every year for the top 3 Fashion programs in the country, proudly. FIDM out here was a distant 5th at the time, fighting with Kent State.

DAAP was 2nd at that time.

That hadn’t been enough to make me walk away from the slightly racism -tinged ( yet, even then, topically understandable) “inner-city academics kid” offer from Cornell. I was coming from an urban performing Arts magnet school that did also make us nail a college prep curriculum, but my AP classes were taught at the Cleveland museum of Art by it’s CMA EDU Dept, Cleveland institute of Art staff and CWRU teachers.

My ACT tests were technically off the charts (96percentile-ish) & I had national merit scholarship monies but even my teachers gave me lists of books to devour beyond curriculum clicks so I wouldn’t be a menace in the back of the class due to boredom.

Cornell had wanted me to do a “prove you can hang academically for real” semester and I almost did it.

Why? Because I’d always been a nerd. Heck, I’d tested into the school of science & was there a year before Arts. A cocky, laidback, dare I say lazy brainiac that ate up the city’s magnet circuit from 1st grade, Christopher Walken vs scenery style. There was breezily nothing for me to compete With, really. Because we didn’t do the sports training circuit. I’d grown up always Having to make it interesting intellectually for myself.

I almost went through with it because I was fuckin curious my dang self lol. It would’ve been a diagnostic. & more importantly, their fashion division was creating the fabrics that NASA rocket-ships & satellites used.

It was a straight #thisisScifi fashist pathway to a kid who grew up with Leonard Nimoy as her Jiminy Cricket, “In Seach of”- wise.

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White woman. Petite. Shaved head, Lil wire rimmed, blue tinted spectacles. Amazing texture phenom, personal uniform- wise. She got me to seriously consider picking her program with money.

Yeah, there was scholarship funds but that wasn’t the money she waved under my nose. DAAP’s program chucked you into the fashion industry last quarter of your sophomore year. To work. For real. Standard Design assistant money.

“You can hunt your own prey~”

Which meant there was a list… but you could pick ANY company on the planet, pull your portfolio together and there was a division that basically… acted as your agent. Headhunter showed you off. Sink or swim. You got in where you could get in.

I REMEMBER the one chick who was The badass a year or so above me shook down Byron Lars, got in and wham. She’d been proof of life.

But even that hadn’t been enough. Because I didn’t want to make fucking dresses.

“Menswear…or Rocketships~”

“By the time you return from your first co-op ( the gig) Our menswear division will be Live, headed by me-“

SOLD!

… That was how I ended up in Cincinnati.

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What in the ever- actual-Fuck… does all that have to do with Lex Wexner?

Well…

The ‘power moves’ Lex Wexner made in the mid 90s destroyed so much the Fashion industry had going for itself when it came to dexterity and Originality. How so?

His L brands? The Limited. He made it explode into a behemoth, a juggernaut…and moved operations hubs to the middle of fucking Ohio. All that money they’re talking about now with epi-pen was coagulating around Columbus in 1994.

It was all dirty. And you smelled the taint. I’d Never liked Cincinnati.

The Christmas burning crosses shit was my point of fuck this nonsensical place no return.

But it’d HAD integrity with the DAAP program. Architecture was in the top three-it wasn’t just fashion.

But when he started expanding… they looked at DAAP as a farm in their own backyard. &the students and professors…in a blink of an eye began being seen as their slaves. Cogs to build out their design rooms. In the middle of fucking corn fields in Ohio. And those fuckers Embraced that shit.

That all started becoming obvious top of my sophomore year. In the listing offered, highlighted for those on the fashist co-op circuit. Quarter by quarter it got narrower. The options. I’d felt myself asphyxiating as it went down.

Was clubbing six nights a week on top of an insane course load in Design & otherwise, to stay sane as all the female professors morphed into fembots and StepFord wives, nurturing the ideals of getting to be a big time designer and being home in a Columbus fn suburb for dinner.

I’m sure Kent State fashists got it worse.

It was ‘for our own good,’ the diminishing of options.

&I get the school ‘thought it was doing the right thing’ because careers were possible” & the industry was coming to us…

But IT WAS THE MONEY. University of Cincinnati got Flooded with dirty money.

Those lofty design rooms? They were in repressed, sexist as F, racist as F, Homophobic as F fn Ohio.

Which also meant that they immediately started balking about standard fashion salaries.

“Why should we pay you the 90k you were promised by your second year on average?”

All the “aren’t you married? Why do you Need that much money anyway?” Shit was pre- planned.

BECAUSE that was the other element.

The real Bible Belt intersects Ohio.

There were NO guys in my fashion year.

There was ONE male teacher. The girls were groomed.& marched like passive lemurs off cliffs.

And keep in mind I am FROM northern Ohio. I loved growing up there. But…I don’t know how else to explain it.

Industrially? IT SMELLED WRONG FROM IT’S INCEPTION.

By the time I was up for my first co-op (debutanting lol) 98% of the gigs were up in design rooms around fn Limited companies. It happened THAT fast.

I looked at them like they were crazy. One chick cracked at my WTF. Was like “…things are Changing. FAST.”

I used the one get outta jail free card I had. Because even though I had a cadre of BFFs up at Ohio State Twyla Tharpeing their crazy fn hearts out there was No fucking way.

“Can I still ask you to submit me directly to other companies, anywhere?”

She was like “For now? Yeah.”

I named my target. She submitted me. I got the gig.

…and the Upperclassmen who’d so Readily towed the “I guess we’re all going to fucking Columbus to Limited companies” line… Fucking REVOLTED.

Because they posted the assignments.

Livid.

Atrocities allll ova the place. LANGUAGE lol. Those spoilt, go along to get along lil fuckers showed Their Asses!

DEMANDED THAT I GIVE IT UP (fuck yall). Said it wasn’t fair, I was a Sophmore(fuuuuckayall). Made it about RACE , in this but she’s Black (fuckakayoudaloo you!) Way-

…they Veruka Salted the fuck out en masse. They my daddy Donated the fuck out.

& THEN… they tried to Force… the NYC company that I’d picked To hunt who picked my ass back… to see the portfolios of allllll the affronted upperclassmen who’d had literal YEARS of being able to do the same thing I’d done vs taking what was handed to them.

That was the end.

The company said ‘Fuck yall’ and canceled the co-op completely to NOT do that. & those older than my ass kids saw that as a victory. Taking that from me. Because that’s how sommayallknow yall get.

But they were also stupid as fuck in their placatedness. “As long as SHE Doesn’t get that~”

I was As Instantly out of mind.

The woman who’d allowed me to get the gig on merit didn’t update the list beyond taking that company off.

& she… connected me to the man who’d hired me… who’d pulled the co-op to say fuck them…and HE silently got me into the design room at Avirex and rented out a room to me in Fort Greene. For peanuts. Which changed everything.

I came back from that glorious summer and they’d run the woman who’d brought me there out and killed the menswear division she’d been scheduled to launch with no fanfare.

Why? Name a Limited company from then that did menswear. The program was completely cucked.

Slobbing that Limited nob ferociously, never looking back. Salted every field of promise that didn’t lead to Limited or Express and beyond.

Eventually Express did some menswear but it sucked balls the entirety of its existence.

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…so I applied as a transfer into FIT and the New School[Parsons].Got into both programs and took myself to Europe to study the menswear industry boots on the ground[partying my fn ass off primarily instead] before picking FIT and deferringtheNew School( just in case).

Why FIT?

1. Bona Fide menswear program, even though it was giving up a BSD for an AA and coming out the same yr as classmates because DAAP was a 5 year program.

2. They knew who I was actually in NYC hunting, Great White Buffalo of menswear style. & promised to respect my leaving if I finally got him. Dimitri. He’d been hounded for years, from fn Ohio, while at Avirex-) & had no fn choice…at least in my opinion. & I pestered him as perniciously as a young designhead could until it was his opinion too.

When he allowed me to do an apprenticeship with him for the last 6 months he thought he’d be open… they slapped me on the ass and yelled some variant of “have fun, he’s a genius, but he’s crazy-“

…and he was. But I lived for it. He taught me everything and I fixed his BOH, his corp sponsorship & donations, revamped everything forward facing, ran the showroom- learned from all his licensing with Japan… he didn’t let me design shit. I didn’t ask. Instead of shutting his doors he stayed open five years after letting me Virgo the ef out For him. & I debuted my own line a month before both Clutches of design school mates graduated with their five outfit Thesis essays. Naan an ounce of animosity amongst, either. They got legit backstage show credits on my show that they used. In nyc. & fought not to leave.

The apprenticeship was on how to truly build a design house where you don’t have to give a fuck about what the rest of everyone in the industry is bowing to. HOW to honor whatever your design esthetic is and to monetize the fuck out of with alignment, authenticity and fn integrity.

… which was all of the stuff Lex Wexner’s dirty money invasion had programmed out of the designers produced by those Ohio schools.

The definitions of what made a designer the best mutated under that tsunami of his money.

But I didn’t hold it against him, per se…

Because there were NOT guns put to their heads, those turncoats. They INSTANTLY became willfully complicit.

It took the most minimal smattering of trinketry to sell out back in the day artistically and otherwise. Especially in fn Ohio.

The death hallows of intractably homogeneous fuckery calling itself fashion the last 15 years as it squeezed the life out of all else? That shit was in the groundwork laid in 95.

Vance repping it…is honest.

… but am I surprised at how much all this dirty fn shit keeps frothing up from the gutters of roads I got told I was crazy to refuse to walk down?

NOPE.

I wasn’t even saved. I was happily nicknamed tha Evil Angel at times. Was ambivalent as fuck about alot of things.

But even iiii knew that shit that was shifting shit with that piously pinched look to their faces-again, Bible Belt +Mapplethorpe underground atmospherics- was fn feces.

I think Ruth Carter did DAAP too, right in that golden age period I got the tail end of. I think she left too, through the co-op program when it was on fire, and never looked back. For her own reasons.

It… was a great school. For design. In the middle of Hell lol. But those licks of flames were exacerbated by Wexner having money to fn Burn.

It …Very well may still be. A great school. But I’ve been back to Ohio twice since I got the fuck out. In 2000, pressing charges. & 2008.

Ironically , that 2000 return was spent fighting the dirty system everyone has spent the last 2 years choking on the reality of its existence, when nobody wanted to believe me on how dank the system was.

There’s no death that would bring me back.

[There WAS one. But it happened so fast- The top dawg of my feral nerdy Amazon gang growing up almost got the band back together-I was going to dip into the bear claw trap of Ohio to go to a Joan Jett concert with her in 2015, I think. But she died suddenly. Right after making sure we were all connected again. ][&… there’s One thing that could get me back but I never speak on it.]

All the dirty cops shit, the dirty CPS shit, the school administrators and actual doctors taking care of Epi-pen’s raped and knocked up little girls so the monsters could eat the Vernix off the newborn baby bodies ( what they supposedly mean by cream cheese) and then do worse… those fucks Jim Jonesing their lil two steps steadily across the natl stage keyed to this horrible shit…all circling the cesspool drain that that pop of industry gave off even in 95?

In OHIO?

…not a surprise at all.