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This summer 2022 I had the opportunity to intern at a luxury fashion company called Miguelina in New York City. Miguelina was inspired by her love for fashion and travel when she first got the idea to launch her collection in 1998. Ever since then, she has created intricate and beautiful garments to showcase this concept of fashion and travel. I knew I wanted to intern here after learning more about the company and seeing the garments online. I applied at the end of April 2022 after I realized I didn’t want to stay in Iowa this summer or in the future. I wanted more. I wanted to go out truly in the industry and I am so glad I made that decision. Fast forward about 2 weeks and I was offered the internship. This summer has been nothing short of a dream come true and I am so incredibly thankful. 

 

Miguelina is a smaller brand with 4 employees total; one for design, marketing, pattern-making, and of course; Miguelina herself. I really enjoyed the smaller environment because I felt like I was truly able to get a feel of what the fashion industry is like and I was able to do a lot more one-on-one learning. I was under the assistant designer and a lot of my projects were about helping her with sketches, tech flats, POMS, fabric sketching, lace sketching, organizing sheets for the market, and getting the pattern-making cards ready. I learned so much about Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, as well as what a day-to-day life is like for a company like this! It was incredible to see the process of design for their spring/summer 2023 drop! 

 

At the beginning of June I was working a lot with the assistant designer on creating sketches on illustrator for future ideas or rendering past sketches for the future; depending on what Miguelina wanted! Learning to sketch on illustrator was scary at first because I’ve never done that before, but I learned quickly and was able to create a good amount of different sketches! I used a technical flat croquis as my base and then went in with drawing out the basic outline of the garment/design. My biggest challenge was creating the colors, patterns, trims, fabrics etc, and rendering them on illustrator. As the weeks went on, I learned more and more and got the hang of it really quickly. Pretty soon I was able to render lace trims, braided trims, belts, buttons, colors, fabrics, etc! 

 

I had a lot of big projects I worked on throughout my time here, but one of my favorite and most challenging was creating a lace trim from an image inspired by Adam and Eve. This took a lot of trial and error. I first started by scanning the image in and then tracing over it to get the motifs I wanted. Then I played around with how I wanted it to look. I then had to take all of what I drew and turn it into a lace; this was challenging. I took inspiration from other laces on how to draw the laces for certain aspects of the drawing I did; such as the tree and figuring out which lines to make thicker and which ones to make thinner. In the end, I am happy with how it turned out! I also was able to create a print from this image as well and played around with different sketches on how it would look!

The third big project I am choosing to talk about is a 36” by 36” (full yard) crochet tablecloth fabric. This project I had complete creative freedom, and once again; a lot of trial and error came with it! I was inspired by damask print and wanted to create an intricate fabric that was crocheted/laced and could be utilized for a garment. I created a bunch of motifs and placed them on the board how I wanted and each piece of my drawing is placed on; nothing is in repeat! Except for the background that symbolizes the crochet aspect of it to tie it all in together! 

 

I am so thankful for this summer and this opportunity. I am incredibly grateful for these projects and happy with my growth and how they turned out! I did a lot and learned a lot through my 10 weeks here. I am proud of the work that I created, especially for only just learning a lot of these tools and techniques. I will forever remember this opportunity and forever be thankful!