Last week I got to visit Molly’s school for the first time. In 2005 she quit her last-in-a-string of unrewarding tech-company jobs and enrolled at Apparel Arts, a 1930s style technical school in Dog Patch that teaches fashion-oriented pattern-making, seamstress and tailoring skills. Eschewing digital possibilities the school teaches the arts the same way they’ve been mastered since the beginning of the century.

While Molly used to come home from work unfulfilled and frustrated she is now challenged daily and learning skills that will guarantee her a wide variety of professional employment. As it turns out pattern making is a bit of a forgotten art, yet is as just as needed as ever. Fashion designers are 100% reliant on trusted pattern makers to turn their ideas into reproducible clothing lines and so far there is no machine or software that can turn designs into finished product. Pattern Makers are the UI architects and fashion world and seamstresses are the web engineers. I guess it’s no sunrise terms like interfaces, seams, patterns and templates are as common in web development as they are in clothing fabrication.

I find it intriguing and wonderful that the pleasure she derives from the challenge of decomposing a sketched design into it’s individual pieces that only when sewn together perfectly (like getting your CSS layout perfect) make the garment look exactly as it was sketched (or spec’ed I could say ;) All the while Molly has been KOIT’s fashion columnist and she’s even hard at work on a new web presence that be a much deeper blend of her fashion and writing skills.

Here are some more pictures: