Teens who view upcycling as a vehicle for change make debut at South Coast Plaza
A portion of Costa Mesa’s South Coast Plaza — a mecca for the brand conscious — on Thursday celebrated a different kind of awareness, as Orange County student designers and devotees of the art of upcycling showcased their own conscious creations.
Six teen fashion designers working in three teams were given the task of reimagining, reconfiguring or repurposing materials and items provided by premium handbag maker Hammitt before presenting their work Thursday in a storefront in the shopping complex.
The high fashion fundraiser was topped off by a runway show in which friends-turned-models took the upcycled bags for a spin on the catwalk for a crowd of potential buyers.
Called “Youth in Fashion,” the project was one small part of a months-long fellowship they and 55 other enterprising high schoolers have engaged in under the aegis of the Orange County nonprofit Dragon Kim Foundation. Proceeds from designs sold went to team members and the foundation’s fellowship fund.
Now in its fifth year, the fellowship program provides innovative teens with the mentorship, training and funds necessary to help their dreams take flight, according to founder Daniel Kim.
“They apply to us with a community service idea,” the Tustin resident explained. “We give them intensive leadership training, business training — we call it ‘MBA in a box’ — then hook the kids up with a mentor or professional in their related field and fund them up to $5,000.”
Ri Gomez, a 17-year-old Garden Grove resident who attends Samueli Academy, said she heard of the fellowship when her design teacher asked the class to submit projects that would benefit the community and possibly be submitted for entry into the program.
Gomez teamed up with classmate and program fellow Gina Buitron, of Santa Ana, who shared her passion for upcycling and its ability to counteract the environmental toll of fast fashion. Together, they created a camp where LGBTQ+ youth could upcycle clothes and learn about social entrepreneurship.
“We ran our own individual presentation and had classes on upcycling for teens and allies,” she said of the effort, held under the team name Opia Upcycling. “Since our project was based around the LGBTQ+ community, for each bag we tried to incorporate that as a theme and called [the line] ‘Coming out into Existence.’”
Rylen Schmid, an 18-year-old from Newport Beach who attends Orange Lutheran High School, was paired up with Rosary Academy student Ayah Mohammed in a project where they taught girl scouts to upcycle blue jeans.
Working as team STYLED (Sustainably Teaching the Youth a Lifestyle of Ethnical Design), they partnered with Orange County chapters of the Girl Scouts and Girls, Inc. to take donated Hammitt bags and add painted details that transformed them into one-of-a-kind pieces.
“They donated bags to our project, and we were able to do whatever we wanted with them as long as it fit within the project,” Schmid said. “We’ve gone out to find different projects and have run an upcycling program, where we teach about the dangers of fast fashion. It’s been so amazing.”
Team Greenprint — a collaboration between Cypress High School seniors George Iyalomhe and Ayden Quichocho — took a slightly different approach to Thursday’s show. After the teams had taken a tour of Hammitt’s Hermosa Beach headquarters, they opted to take pieces of leather to build their own designer bags from the bottom up.
“We have a bag on auction made from scrap leather — it’s really cool and has a little place for your phone,” he said of one of seven bags the pair created.
This summer, the friends presented a weeklong camp, where they taught youth aged 9 to 14 to make tote bags out of unwanted jeans and, in the process, learn more about environmentalism and emergency preparedness.
“The Dragon Kim Foundation was able to fund us and give us everything we needed to bring our dreams and ideas into reality,” Iyalomhe said.
Tony Drockton, who founded Hammitt in 2008 and lent his store and materials to Thursday’s Youth in Fashion show, said he was impressed with the teens’ inspiring designs and, more broadly, the tenets behind the Dragon Kim Foundation’s fellowship program.
“It was love at first sight for me, because of the entrepreneurship, the community service and the mentoring,” Drockton said. “We have a lot of bags, either they get returned or they get blemished. [The fellowship] said why don’t we take these bags and upcycle them and make them even more beautiful? It’s just great.”
The fellowship is just one outcropping of the Dragon Kim Foundation, named for Kim’s son, Dragon, who was attending Orange County School of the Arts for music in 2015, and had just created a music program for disadvantaged youth, when he died on a camping trip to Yosemite National Park.
Kim and his wife Grace created the nonprofit so the music program could continue. In the years since, the foundation formed the fellowship program and numerous other community service efforts, including Delivering with Dignity, a collaboration that provided more than 80,000 restaurant meals to people most at risk from the virus.
The idea is to foster connections that grow the greater good. It’s the same with the fellowship, Kim said.
“It’s about understanding what’s going on, then getting them to make a vision that is bigger than themselves,” he added.
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