THE PREP

Lucy W. Baird ’10 isn’t even twenty yet, but she’s a pro when it comes to working with needles and thread. She started by altering clothes with her mother’s instruction, then she moved on to making costumes for high school plays. But making a dress in 24 hours with only 24 bucks? Even this fair-haired fashionista hasn’t done that.

Lucy pairs up with Maya E. Frommer ’07 to start her quest at The Garment District. Feeling the pressure of the contest, Baird opts for a simple design that compensates for a lack of both time and funds. She rummages through the jumbled racks, emerging with scarves, a dress, and a patterned bathing suit top.

Top in hand, Baird then searches for the fabric that will make up the rest of the dress. Designing without a sketch, but with the colorful bikini fabric to work with, Baird looks for a solid color to make up the bottom half of her creation. After aT ride to Chinatown, Baird, after a long search, finds a deep purple fabric for the dress and gauze for the straps for about 14 dollars.

By 10 p.m. that night, Baird has taken apart the bikini top and pinned it to her dressmaker’s mannequin. A summer of intensive fashion classes at The Art Institute of Chicago taught her some basic design skills, but starting a dress from scratch is a far cry from the altering and designing that she’s used to.

Baird calls it a night at 4:05 a.m. With most of the dress finished, Baird realizes the next morning that she needs snaps to hold her design together. After fitting her model, Rachel F. Banay ’07-’08, she checks her receipts—the snaps pushed her 86 cents over budget.

Waiting for the show to begin, Baird is more excited than nervous. “I think it will be so exciting to see other Harvard designers,” she says, “because there are so few of us here.”

Lucy poses for photos with her model before sending Banay, and her creation, out on to the runway.

OVERALL SCORES

Aesthetics/Style: 8

Creativity: 7

Craftsmanship: 8

Je ne sais quoi: 8.25

Overall: 7.8125

Designer: Lucy W. Baird '10