Karin Brown knew her son was on to something when he asked her to stop at Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Store on their way home from school, so he could re-create a dress designed by a contestant on the popular reality TV series “Project Runway.”
Her son, Ariel Chang, headed straight for the remnant table and grabbed a gold and white floral fabric like the one he’d seen on the TV show in a dress designed by contestant Michael Knight.
“I made a giant cylinder and just threw a belt on it,” says Ariel, who moved with his parents from Cupertino to San Jose last summer to attend the arts magnet Lincoln High School. “That was as close as I could get to Michael’s design without making a mess.”
He’s been taking sewing and fashion design classes ever since.
Around the Bay Area and across the country, enrollment for sewing classes for kids and teens is on the rise — a trend many attribute to the popularity of Bravo TV’s “Project Runway” and other fashion-related TV series.
“It’s what Julia Child did for cooking when she brought French cuisine,” says Brown, who is thrilled the show is filled with talented male contestants. Designing “is certainly cool now” among boys, too.
Though the rising interest is discernible, it wasn’t enough to save the big fabric departments at Wal-Mart, which has downsized them, and it came too late to save Brooks College, a design school in Sunnyvale that closed last summer. But the fashion trend is giving the industry hope for the next generation.
“My mom knew how to sew, but it has stopped being that thing that you pass on,” says Seryn Potter, 33, co-owner of Flirt and co-designer of Flirt clothing line, based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
“A sewing machine can be a very daunting thing. It used to be something that everyone knew how to do. Now you put someone in front of a sewing machine, and they freak out. It’s like a whole generation of women learning to ride bikes or something.”
At Ray’s Sewing Machine Center on Park Avenue in San Jose, owner Ken Gresham says that, in the month before Christmas, 20 parents bought sewing machines for their “Project Runway”-inspired children.
At the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, enrollment in the fashion department has tripled since “Project Runway” first aired in 2004, from about 600 to 1,800.
While other factors are at work, including the addition of online courses, the school’s fashion director, Simon Ungless, says, —‰’Project Runway’ has really (made) the process of fashion design … more accessible, more visible … for these young people.”
At ArtHouse Kids on San Jose’s Lincoln Avenue, girls and boys between ages 8 and 12 are enrolling in Camp Fashionista, a series of classes given by Dori Duncan.
“I want to be a fashion designer,” says Sophia Auger, 8. “Santa knew I liked sewing so much he gave me five fabrics and two sketch pads and a set of three real sketching pencils. I have a whole folder of my sketches.”
She’s enrolled in three sewing classes at the same time: one at Camp Fashionista, another at Beverly’s Fabrics & Crafts in South San Jose and the third at a Prairie Queens Quilt Shop in Cambrian Park Plaza.
“She’s so passionate. I’ve never seen her like this before,” says Sophia’s mother, Sonia Auger. “They are so quick in school to tell (kids) what to do that they don’t get to express themselves any more.” Sophia has found her outlet in sewing.
Julia Rowlee, 14, received a dress form for Christmas and, since becoming a “Project Runway” fan, is planning her college education so that one day she will be able to launch her own line of clothing.
“It will be called JuliaG for Julia Grace,” she says.
Even with the renewed enthusiasm for fashion, Ungless says the Academy of Art University can’t yet require prospective students to submit a portfolio of their work before admittance because they lack the experience or coursework in high school to create one.
When he first moved from England to work at the university in 1996, “I was really quite surprised; people would come into college who hadn’t sewn or drawn or done crazy crafts,” Ungless says. “The students come in, and they’re really technologically savvy, but they’re not resourceful when it comes to working with their hands or being really creative.”
So to help prepare high schoolers who haven’t had the advantage of art or sewing classes, he says, the university is offering summer camps and Saturday classes.
Ariel hopes to enroll in one of them. And he’s got a brimming portfolio, going back to his fifth-grade days when he made his first dress out of colorful tissue paper taped at the seams. Now, he has boxes of fabric and sews on the machine he received for his bar mitzvah.
“I just love seeing the dresses come down the runway,” Ariel says.
Contact Julia Prodis Sulek at jsulek@mercurynews.com or (408) 278-3409.