It’s 1986, and Dillard’s is having a contest called Design Your Dream Dress. A then 8-year-old girl from Arkansas named Susan Gail Taylor wins and the department store makes the dress she sketched.
It was only the beginning of a life long adoration for all things fashion. “Could I draw as an eight year old?” she said, Yeah sure. Can I draw now No! Fashion design is not where my heart is,”
Instead of being the next great dressmaker, Taylor grew up to be a Ph.D. student studying rhetoric and composition at the University of South Florida. She wanted to view fashion at a different angle, “providing a more meaningful perspective through writing about fashion, and writing about what it means to people, more like telling people stories,” she said.
Taylor has been working on her dissertation which focuses on the elite of the fashion world. Holding her hands above her head, she said “I see fashion up here in this realm and it trickles down lessons for us to take and do with it what we will. I want to know what goes on up there.” Taylor is also a graduate teaching associate and uses fashion in the classroom to teach about semiotics and visual arguments and has started her own fashion blog.
Her mother died when she was nine, and she grew up with her father and brother who helped her develop her own style.
“Here I am left with two guys who know nothing about clothes, so I had to learn real fucking quick,” she said. “When I started picking things out, then I started defending them. if I had to defend it then that means other little girls probably had to defend what they wanted to wear.” she said, “and that’s where I started wanting to write about fashion.” She not only became obsessed with writing about fashion but also going to different events around Tampa that celebrate fashion including the ones at International Plaza.
The high-end mall has had a string of different events in September to commemorate Fashion Week, which is held in New York and many cities around the world including Milan and Paris. Thursday Sept. 8th was the kickoff to Fashion Week with an event called Fashion’s Night Out. Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour of Vogue helped create Fashion’s Night Out to help the economy grow. International Plaza went all-out for the event, hosting various events at the department stores. But the fashion show hosted by icon, Tim Gunn was the most anticipated event with more than 200 people in attendance, according to mall officials.
Gunn is the chief creative officer of Liz Claiborne, which own Juicy Couture, Lucky Brand and Kate Spade, all of which were featured during the fashion show. But he is best known for his role on “Project Runway”.
Fans of Gunn lined the white catwalk and crowded the otherwise spacious Grand Court, located in the middle of the mall’s first floor between two escalators near the doors to Bay Street. The upper level was not immune either, dozens of fans, including Taylor, stood against the ledges to witness this event. In order to get the right shot, many guests rode the escalators up and down to snap a picture of Gunn.
Having Gunn in the back of her mind Taylor set off to find the perfect outfit to wear to Gunn's appearance. She chose a black A-line cotton lace mini and black vintage inspired shirt with the words “Couture is Here” she said she chose this not only represent and respect the brand Gunn heads but “I felt like it was Juicy, I felt like it was representative of Juicy.” she said, “I wanted him to see, yeah I know about fashion, I respect where you works and the brands that you represent.” She added her own edginess to the look with zippered heels and her tattoos and piercings complimented the all black attire.
Taylor had the once in a lifetime chance to meet her style idol after the fashion show he hosted and received a photograph capturing the moment she never thought would come.
“Don’t be a trend follower be a trendsetter, set one for yourself.” she said, “It takes some power to walk out of the house and wear what you want to wear and be able to say I want to wear this because, fill in the blank.”
Events like the fashion show and Fashion’s Night Out are intoxicating to those who really respect the art of fashion. Thousands of followers around the world congregate to events like these with hope to see new trends they can emulate and hear new insight from the upper elite in the fashion world.
“Events like this, yeah, it is almost like a religion because you can come together and when you really get the right mix of people who care about fashion, who care about the trends, the classics and the designers and care about the future of fashion, and it’s not just this big bitch fest of hating on each other, it can really work,” she said. But Taylor has low hope for this ever happening because she says people in fashion like to be better than each other and create a hierarchy.
Even though Taylor is a devout fashionista she does not agree with everything these godly designers do. “I don’t see fashion like everybody else because it’s just like going to the grocery store; I don’t see food. If I were to walk down the meat aisle I see a line of dead bodies, she said, “when I walk into a store and see leather, fur, wool, silk, I see dead bodies.” Taylor is a vegan and says being one makes it difficult sometimes to shop but she does praise designers like Marc Jacobs and Betsey Johnson for making vegan options that are fashionable.
Taylor wishes more people could understand where their handbags and clothes were coming from but knows people will continue to buy them to stay on top of trends. "Do they want to think about the process of the slaughter and the--oh my God look what this girl is wearing right here--do they want to think about that?" she said. A girl walked by wearing an unflattering dress that was unsuitable to Taylor's standards for this mall. “I'm such a hypocrite,” she said.
Taylor described her fascination with the top of the fashion realm from a scene in the fashion movie “The Devil Wears Prada.”
“The scene with the cerulean blue sweater and Andy’s laughing at high fashion and she (the editor-in-chief) tells her who decided that color would be fashionable and how it ended up in the little dime store bin for her. I wish people could understand that and why they like certain things,” she said, “do we really think about who’s telling us to like this color and who are they telling to like it, who are the customers?”
Taylor may not yet know who is deciding what we wear but her idol validated her entire life and her dissertation by telling her to “make it work,” and to stick with everything she’s doing and letting her know how interesting her dissertation topic is. “I can’t believe I just told Tim Gunn I’d make it work and he said it back to me,” she said with tears in her eyes.
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