Meet the 14-year-old fashion designer from North Potomac

A 12 months ago, Chloe Ayissi-Etoh didn’t know how to sew. But this spring, in a faculty auditorium packed with extra than 900 folks, the teen soaked in thunderous applause as a bona fide manner designer.

In a purple costume she’d completed perfecting just minutes earlier, Chloe followed designs who’d walked the phase at Walter Johnson Higher University in Bethesda in nine seems to be from her first selection, below her manufacturer chlolanà—a mix of her 1st name and middle name, Alana.

For Chloe, an eighth grader at the time, the manner clearly show was a important accomplishment. What created it even much more impressive was that she’d experienced just four months to layout, sew and match the dresses, trousers, shirts and corsets she’d sketched for numerous body kinds. The clearly show was held for the duration of a retreat for the Minority Students Plan, a team led by Montgomery County Public Universities college students which is doing work to close the achievement hole.

“I did not have time to even sleep—I acquired involving two and four hrs a night time,” claims Chloe, 14, who lives in North Potomac and attended Robert Frost Middle School in Rockville. “It was extremely hectic, but if I’m established on some thing, I’m heading to do it regardless of what any person states and no subject how insane it seems.”

The trend clearly show was so effectively been given that it earned an encore effectiveness two months afterwards as aspect of Robert Frost’s 50th anniversary celebration. Robert Frost science trainer Sunila Varghese, who co-sponsors the school’s chapter of the Minority Students Software and has acknowledged Chloe for two decades, notes that the teenager managed two assistants and two makeup artists in the course of the display, and also choreographed walks for the products, all fellow classmates.

“You could listen to a gasp when the [audience] listened to she was 14. My heart was just full,” Varghese states. “She’s a extremely vivid and talented woman, and no matter what she does, she’s a rock star at it.”

Chloe, a mounting ninth grader at Wootton Substantial Faculty in Rockville, describes her aesthetic as generally monochrome with a pop of color—“a mixture of streetwear and chic.” She attracts inspiration from manner manufacturers together with London designer Home of CB, acknowledged for its figure-hugging items.

Chloe turned intrigued in fashion in June 2021 immediately after getting into thrift-shop purchasing and viewing TikTok films about upcycling apparel. She before long commenced using sewing lessons from an aunt. A great number of hours on YouTube adopted as she soaked up sewing and fashion terminology.

After school begun that tumble, Chloe claims, she no lengthier required to dress in sweats and hoodies to course. She immediately turned acknowledged for her own layouts, even earning a “Best Dressed” award from fellow eighth graders in a pupil study. “For some motive, I just became a fashionista,” she says. “I would go into my closet, glance at some clothing, place together an outfit, and it would convert out wonderful.”

Just because she’s no lengthier donning sweats and hoodies in the hallways doesn’t indicate Chloe under no circumstances attire down. But even then, she suggests, she places a spin on her search. “Honestly, it depends on my mood,” she states. “If I come to feel extra that working day, I’ll produce a truly extra outfit for that day at school—maybe spice things up with some substantial-waisted flare pants and [a] turtleneck with an less than-bust corset.”

Describing the course of action of deconstructing a garment as “beautiful,” Chloe earlier this 12 months took out a zipper and ripped up the seams of a pair of stretchy pink shorts she bought for $2 at a thrift retail store. She then  added interfacing and produced an under-bust corset she at times wears to school about a white dress shirt. “My mom doesn’t like that I have these types of a significant obsession with corsets,” she admits.

Her mom, Katrina, 45, states she endures continual vogue tips from Chloe, her only daughter between four children. “She does check with if she can model and gown me, but I tell her, ‘No, get out of my closet. I’m fantastic,’ ” Katrina suggests. “But probably this summertime I’ll question her to make me a shirt.”

Chloe strategies to turn into a designer with her possess line of middle- to higher-stop prepared-to-have on clothing. She suggests she finds inspiration everywhere and recalls at the time devising a shade-blocked streetwear search from a ladder propped versus a wall in French class. She is converting a basement storage space at her residence into a stitching studio with mild pink partitions, white tables, lots of green plants, and a sign bearing her model title.

Katrina, meanwhile, is seeking to reconcile that the daughter she has observed hop from a person pastime to the next—though Chloe even now enjoys to bake and cook—now would seem fully commited to a foreseeable future in trend. “The Lord will have to do the job in mysterious strategies,” she says. “Never did I see this just one coming. … She enjoys what she does, and you can not obtain that.”