ALUMNI NOTABLES Write This Down

relaxes the eye,” she says.

She spotted an opportunity. “Art Basel was bringing this ultra-sophisticated international crowd … it was the right time.” In 2007, she moved to Miami, buying and renovating a historic South Beach building (once a hotel called The Webster) that was originally designed by Art Deco architect Henry Hohauser. In 2009, Hériard Dubreuil opened her first store in that building and named it for the hotel. It still has a hotel facade, so passersby can’t tell it’s a store at first glance. But “this ‘secret’ location brings some of the magic,” she says. The store, “meant to feel like a safe haven where you can express yourself,” is luxurious (of course) with an eclectic yet comforting aesthetic. There’s vintage wallpaper, contemporary art, terrazzo floors, furniture from a mix of decades, and a fireplace mantel. Hériard Dubreuil also included nods to Miami—flamingo-pink accents and the store’s signature tropical orange-blossom scent, which shoppers can bring home as a candle or room spray.

The Webster is stocked with must-have labels for those who crave “timeless pieces, but who are also daring and want to make an entrance,” Hériard Dubreuil says. Since opening, she’s expanded from women’s, men’s, and children’s wear to include home and beauty.

Alongside Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent live more contemporary brands like Amina Muaddi, Jacquemus, and Off-White. But Hériard Dubreuil doesn’t merchandise by brand label. “Every brand is here for a reason, and no brand is put above another.”

Instead, she mixes them together, often sorted by color story. “It’s exciting but also

As of early 2023, The Webster has 10 stores, including in Los Angeles (where Hériard Dubreuil now lives), New York, and Toronto—her first international location. Though the assortments vary based on the locale, each store shares design DNA with the South Beach flagship. For example, the LA location, opened in 2020 and designed by architect David Adjaye, is constructed in striking pink concrete. The Webster also has an online store, which accounts for about 30% of sales.

With a roster of exclusive brand names and desirable locations, it’s no surprise celebrities flock to The Webster.

Once, Rihanna stopped by the South Beach flagship between flights and ended up staying the whole day. “We celebrated her bodyguard’s birthday,” Hériard Dubreuil says.

The Webster has collaborated with other stores (Lane Crawford, Target)—and brands (Diesel for spring 2023 New York Fashion Week). But Hériard Dubreuil has also influenced fashion’s biggest night out. Upon viewing the mostly black fall 2013 collection by another collaborator, Anthony Vaccarello, she suggested he make a few dresses in red. “He could have thrown me out the window, but he loved the idea,” she says. A few months later, model Anja Rubik sported one of those red dresses at the Met Gala. Vanessa Machir

Literary Star Angie Cruz, Fashion Design ’94, discusses her new novel thought I might do more good as an immigration lawyer. I was thinking of all the women in my family who worked in factories, and suddenly Cara Romero just appeared and spoke to me, and I listened to her. I did the first draft of the book on my phone.

Angie Cruz’s acclaimed fourth novel, How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water (Flatiron Books, 2022), is narrated by Cara Romero, a 56-year-old Dominican woman who lives in Washington Heights and was downsized from her factory job during the Great Recession. “Write this down,” she tells an employment counselor, “Cara Romero wants to work.” Cruz chatted with us about the novel, her career, and how studying fashion helped her writing.

What does the title mean?

There’s a saying in Spanish, “Don’t drown in a glass of water,” which means, essentially, “Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill.” I thought it was a good way of referring to this character, who has such a distinctive way of speaking and telling stories and of how, in the course of the book, she gets to the other side of things.

What’s your writing process like?

I did many drafts. A lot of young writers are afraid to revise, but as a Fashion Design major, I actually received a lot of training in revision. One professor made us do 100 different sketches for a single outfit, and when we were done, she said, “This is the beginning of the design process.” Revision is about digging in and seeing all the possibilities.

How did you pivot from fashion to fiction writing?

University of Pittsburgh. I tell my students, “You never know how the thing you’re doing now will affect what you’ll do in the future.” —Alex Joseph

Trust the Process

Foad Faridzadeh, Computer Animation and Interactive Media ’04, talks secrets, helicopters, and Lady Gaga a secret.” It was part of a series of three spots created with “a 90-person team, a $4.5 million budget, helicopters” and filmed in just a few weeks.

Several shots of a couple cavorting in water drew on Faridzadeh’s experience using underwater camera setups for his short film The Lake “Filming shorts, I did all kinds of experiments,” he says, “so I let my imagination go wild filming this commercial.”

Though Faridzadeh loves Steven Spielberg, he was inspired to become a director by his father, who had been a film producer in Tehran, Iran. Faridzadeh’s father also encouraged him to learn about editing, from initial concept to post-production. “Most directors don’t know the postproduction process,” Faridzadeh says. “Understanding it prior to shooting gives you so much more of an advantage. Even if plan A or plan B doesn’t work out, you’ve already done your homework.”

How did you create your protagonist, Cara Romero?

In 2017, I was on a New York subway platform on my way to visit my mother. I was having a hard time selling my last novel, Dominicana in the end, it took four years. Trump was president, and I was full of despair and considering a career change. I

It’s all interconnected; I have a deep love for art and design. I put myself through FIT by working as an assistant manager and window designer for a cashmere store on Madison Avenue. But from a young age, I was always told I was a good storyteller, and eventually I got an MFA in fiction writing. Since 2013, I’ve taught writing at the

“If you don’t become the next Spielberg, you’ll make a very good porno director,” Mehdi Faridzadeh told his son director, writer, and visual effects expert Foad Faridzadeh upon seeing his commercial for Secrets Resorts & Spas, which aired during the 2017 Golden Globes Awards. Though Faridzadeh’s résumé definitely does not include pornography, his sultry commercial is full of steamy encounters set to breathy music, encouraging viewers to “make

After graduating from FIT, he apprenticed at the visual effects and animation studio Rhythm & Hues in Los Angeles before returning to New York to attend NYU’s graduate film program and intern (fetching coffee and cleaning bathrooms) at the production company Quietman.

Eventually, Faridzadeh got the chance to provide technical direction for an anti-steroid public service announcement produced with ad agency BBDO, Major League Baseball, and the Partnership for a DrugFree America. This led to a

How hot sauce entrepreneur Sufia Hossain, Production Management ’06, spiced up her career job as a technical director at Quietman, and “right after that, I got a call the PSA had been nominated for an Emmy.”

Since then, he’s worked on movies (like 2013’s Shadow People), commercials for well-known brands (Dior, Alka-Seltzer), docuseries (like Refinery29’s Tehran Unveiled), and short films. In 2019–20, he even directed an opera, Giovanni Bottesini’s Ali Baba, performed by Opera Southwest in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

As creative director and visual effects supervisor for Lady Gaga’s 2011 Marry the Night extended music video (which the multi-hyphenate icon herself directed), Faridzadeh worked on storyboards, planned the production, and “created a marriage between visual effects and what’s happening on screen.”

During one scene, several cars were supposed to burst into flames, but not all of them did. “Lady Gaga was so in character we just continued.

I’m a huge fan of filming as much as possible on camera and only using [visual effects] to further enhance the picture,” Faridzadeh says. “Our eyes are so used to recognizing what’s augmented, it makes good post work even more important.” —V.M.

S

Drawn to the vibrant colors of hot peppers at one of the farmers market stalls, Hossain impulsively scooped some up. “They just talked to me.”

Experimentation with hot sauce recipes in her home kitchen produced mixed results.

“I was horrible when I first started, but for some reason, I still enjoyed that process.”

Hossain persisted, dumping multiple batches down the sink until she found the perfect formula. Encouraged by a Gap colleague’s request to buy a bottle, Hossain soon began selling her hot sauce at flea markets and farmers markets.

“It was a lot of hustle,” she says. But she always kept her sense of humor. “I’m a very silly person; my coping mechanism is to joke and laugh.” Thus her brand, Silly Chilly Hot Sauce, was born.

In 2017, Hossain moved her production to a shared commercial kitchen, and Silly Chilly Hot Sauce achieved placement in NYC gourmet and specialty stores. By 2019, it had expanded to factory production and national

And Silly Chilly’s branding reflects her sensibility: Instead of the skulls, devils, and flames emblazoning many hot sauce bottles, Hossain’s labels show a stylish woman walking a dog.

Nora Maynard that she then tests in Newell’s state-of-the-art R&D facility.

Social Contracts

ufia Hossain was working as a merchandiser at Gap’s New York office and felt stuck, until a 2016 trip to Union Square Greenmarket shifted her career in a surprising direction.distribution, offering a range of flavors from mild and sweet to assertively hot. One of her happiest moments was seeing the spark in a farmer’s eye as she placed an order for 400 pounds of peppers.

While many entrepreneurs launch their businesses with meticulous plans, Hossain’s took shape gradually and intuitively.

“I had no vision of running a hot sauce brand, but slowly I realized how much I enjoyed that whole journey, the process of it. It’s like we love who we love, but we don’t know why.”

Although the move from fashion merchandiser to hot sauce entrepreneur might seem a sharp pivot, Hossain considers it a smooth turn.

“The fashion industry really shaped me. It trained me for everything that I’m doing right now from visual, to marketing, to creating a brand from nothing on my own.”

Whhat does autumn smell like? What about tweed or cashmere? What fragrance evokes a “daybreak rave”? Or the color purple? Does pride have a scent? Does gay pride?

Taylor Perlis puzzles over these kinds of questions. As a fragrance evaluator for Newell Brands, she works with perfumers to bring her ideas for new scents into the world.

“Candles are my life,” she says. “I burn them all year long for different moods.”

This year alone she has introduced a Pride fragrance for Yankee Candle (fruity with a musky vanilla base), launched a Gen Z–targeted candle brand called Friday Collective (including the citrusy “Sunset Disco” and the sagey “Star Lust”), and generated a slew of other scents for Newell’s more sophisticated line, WoodWick.

“I launch probably over 100 fragrances a year,” Perlis says, with breezy nonchalance, as if churning out new smells were as easy as breathing. She finds inspiration everywhere on a hike near her home in South Deerfield, Massachusetts, breathing the crisp air; or at a farmers market, noshing on a doughnut. “That’s the fun part about my job,” she says. “There are so many different types of people out there looking for different types of fragrances. So I really try to create something for everybody.”

Perlis initially went to nursing school, but a retail job at Bath & Body Works changed her plan. She recalls standing on the sales floor thinking: “There’s gotta be people who design these fragrances, people who design the displays and the marketing that’d be such a cool job.”

When she gets an idea for a scent whether something specific like “sakura blossom festival” or a vague feeling like “pride” she sends a brief to the perfume houses that work with Newell. These memos include logistics like price, type of wax blend, the project (whether WoodWick’s new fall line or Yankee’s “scent of the year”), as well as inspirations and market research data. Then, after some back and forth with the perfumers, she gets a sample

“We have these fragrance booths, all glass, and we can play with the airflow inside to mimic different environments,” she says. “So we’ll put candles and room sprays and wax melts in the big booths, and depending on what airflow we choose, we can mimic a living room or a kitchen to see how our products will work once they get into the house.”

Even after the perfumers have concocted the perfect candle fragrance, they need to create a separate formula for the corresponding room spray or car plug-in. “When I first started working here, I thought we could just dump the candle formulation into any form, but that doesn’t work,” she admits. “It’s not easy.”

LaToya Shambo, Advertising and Marketing Communications ’07, helps Black women influencers find brand partnerships

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135 Black influencers, many more than a traditional agent, who might represent just five or six.

“Why are people basing value on color, race, or ethnicity? Value should be based on quality,” she says. “Fairness is not complicated.” n her decade working in advertising, LaToya Shambo noticed that the campaigns almost exclusively featured white talent. That disparity continued with the rise of bloggers and then influencers. “I saw a void in the industry. Who’s out there brokering brand partnerships for Black females? There wasn’t anything specifically for Black women,” she says.For a three-month Disneyland project to promote the theme park to Black and brown consumers, Shambo developed a vision, strategy, and storyline that asked: How do you break up the day-to-day monotony of life in a pandemic? Her answer: Go to Disneyland!

So Shambo took on the mission herself, founding Black Girl Digital (originally Brooklyn Brand Lab) in 2016. “How can I get more people of color, more women of color, paid to do what they love? From a community perspective, I’m spreading the wealth through brand partnerships,” she says.

Yet Perlis says all the testing, the failing, and the tweaking is worth it when she receives the flint jar with the finished candle inside. “Seeing this fragrance come to life is the most magical moment.”

Raquel Laneri

Black Girl Digital connects brands like Disney and the city of Boston—with influencers to market products and services through social media. In brokering these agreements, Shambo fights to ensure that Black influencers are paid fairly. While Black Girl Digital targets diverse audiences and works with Latinx, Asian, and LGBTQ influencers, 80% of the business is focused on Black women. Her impact is significant: In 2022, the company worked with over

Local California-based influencers captured their own “day in the life” experience, from home to park, sharing stories on Instagram and TikTok. The centerpiece of the marketing strategy, a custom video overseen by Shambo, featured an influencer from out of town, capturing their flight, Airbnb accommodations, and an epic park experience including the reservation process, a park escort, food, and a playful day of adventure.

The social media images and clips were authentic, fostering genuine interest. And thanks to Black Girl Digital’s campaign management tool, Disney could access metrics data in real time. “Because the influencers truly enjoyed the experience, their audience was captivated,” Shambo says. “It drove action, and that’s really what we want to do.” —Diana

McClure

35 hue.fitnyc.edu HUE 34 HUE SPRING 2023

A Symphony of Softness

Fern Clausius, Fashion Design ’19

“I’m a very interdisciplinary artist,” says Fern Clausius, an intimate apparel designer whose first collection debuts this year.

Myriad art forms, from photography to burlesque, inspire her intricately tailored pieces, but she is most nourished by music. Her mother is a pianist, and Clausius grew up playing violin and piano. While sketching, she listens to Bach, Shostakovich, Philip Glass, and her other favorite composers, matching textiles to the color and texture the music evokes.

“Music carries me on an emotional path,” she says, “and my hand captures that emotion.”

The pandemic spurred Clausius to start her line, Fern New York.

Furloughed from her design job at luxury intimates house Kiki de Montparnasse, she didn’t find any openings at high-end ateliers and didn’t want to jump to a brand that would “be mass-producing a bunch of clothing that I didn’t feel proud to put out into the world.”

Though she hadn’t planned to start her own brand so soon, she decided the time was right. Her first pieces were custom boudoir basics crafted from remnant textiles, sewn in her home studio and sold to individual clients. She is working with New York factories to produce her first collection, for pre-fall ’23, which she hopes to sell at upscale retailers like Bergdorf Goodman. Her pieces are feminine “lots of laces and silks and anything that oozes luxury and softness” but not just for women. “I want people to be able to explore their feminine side with pieces that fit, whatever their gender might be.”

Jonathan Vatner