My name is Annabelle Walsh, and I am a first-year student at Parsons School of Design, majoring in strategic design & management. My interests include (but most certainly are not limited to) illustration, marketing/advertising, writing, styling, art history, and, perhaps, most importantly — daydreaming. It’s also worth noting that I have a penchant for impractical footwear, anything gingham, and the Grateful Dead. I am a self-identifying sartorialist who enjoys making (often ridiculous) predictions about prospective fashion trends.
I was raised in a small, coastal town in Massachusetts where my interest in fashion was perpetually trivialized. Growing up in an environment where my interest in fashion wasn’t always taken seriously, I knew I had no choice but to move to New York, where I would be surrounded by people who just got it.
Since moving to New York, however, I feel that I’ve been hurdled onto the opposite side of the spectrum; here, everyone takes fashion too seriously. The greatest challenge I’ve encountered in the last eight months is trying to discover a balance between those two extremes — how can I effectively renounce the misconception that fashion is nothing more than a frivolous facet of life, while also maintaining the understanding that it should be fun and should feel good?
If you’re wondering what kind of career I intend to pursue, you won’t find an answer here; I will, however, present you with a Diane von Furstenberg quote that would’ve been my high school yearbook quote had I not resented the idea of being memorialized in a platitudinous record:
“I didn’t always know what I wanted to do, but I always knew the kind of woman I wanted to be.”