CINCINNATI — An Ohio clothing designer is becoming famous not only for his cutting-edge designs but also for his willingness to share them “for free.” Caitlin McCall, a graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s design program, recently made a splash at Omaha’s Fashion Week.
What you need to know Designer Caitlin McCall’s new collection entitled MILOM: Maybe I’ll Live On Mars McCall was inspired by NASA images of Mars taken by the rover in 2017 McCall’s collection was selected for this year’s Omaha Fashion Week McCall plans to make all the patterns in her collection free to public as open source files
It’s no exaggeration to say that McCall’s fashion is out of this world. He called his collection, MILOM.
“It stands for Maybe I’ll Live on Mars,” McCall said. He was fascinated by Mars for years.
“This concept actually started to sink into my brain in 2017,” McCall said. “I was still in (North Carolina State) graduate school at the time, and that’s when the Mars rover started sending back images of the surface of Mars. It generated a lot of buzz.”
His view of exploring the Red Planet is not done through rose-colored glasses. He takes a more practical approach.
“Part of the exploration of getting to Mars is if we don’t have life on Earth and what will happen is the destruction and overconsumption of our planet,” McCall said. “It’s a very human thing. So there’s a question about colonizing Mars and building a community there: are we looking at the right issues?
She sounded the alarm, like Cassandra from Greek Mythology, which inspired one of her most popular creations on the runway, a red jumpsuit with a brightly colored skull embroidered on the back.
“Being Cassandra means being a whistleblower,” she said. “You’re giving a dire warning, and usually this is a situation where people are not prepared to listen to the warning.”
The jumpsuit received good reviews, including from Bella, a model from Kettering who modeled some of the collection for a photo shoot in Cincinnati. Bella is also an amateur astronomer,
“I think it’s really cool, like a military astronaut atmosphere,” he said.
“My family and I love looking at eclipses and various other things in the sky that we want to see. We are definitely out there seeing Mars.”
The piece combines some space-age technology with machine embroidery from Two Fish Apparel in Cincinnati, where McCall works when he’s not designing his latest collection.
“Only half of the designs take more than three hours to run on a machine on the job site,” says McCall.
“If I did this by hand, and worked non-stop like 8 hours a day, it would probably take a month or two.”
He spent months designing and assembling the collection, which was presented in less than five minutes on the runway in Omaha, as part of the city’s fashion week, considered one of the largest and most prestigious fashion weeks in the US.
“It’s always a different scale when it’s on the runway,” McCall said. “Always very fast. It always goes by quickly and it’s always a great high adrenaline feeling.”
McCall was selected by the judges to present his collection in a show known to be more approachable and affordable for emerging designers than venues in New York or Paris.
“It’s a very different story than New York Fashion Week or the entire series, but it costs thousands of dollars to participate as a designer,” McCall said. “This is a very good opportunity. It lowers the barriers for a lot of people.”
This inspired her to share the event’s outfits with sewing fans — by making them all available online — for free.
“Open source pattern making allows people who want to get into fashion and sewing to have a free resource, and this again lowers barriers and makes materials more readily available,” she said.
Fashion Clothing Patterns can cost hundreds of dollars so using McCall’s work for free can help others fly to Mars, without spending a lot of money in the process.
2023-10-19 18:54:28
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