Annabelle Brame, a graduating senior fashion design major with an entrepreneurship minor, is the co-president of Synergy Fashion Group. Synergy was one of the few RSOs involved in this year’s inaugural University of Delaware Fashion Week (UDFW).
UDFW, which began April 26 and concluded May 5, consisted of a variety of events. Synergy had its fashion show at the Delaware Art Museum April 28, where Brame displayed her collection.
Brame, who grew up on the Chesapeake Bay, said that her collection was inspired by the oyster industry and the infrastructure that it provides. She calls it “Takes a Village” due to how both the oyster and the fashion industries have many moving parts.
“I wanted to make a collection that was sustainable … so the whole actual process was good for the environment, but also super educational for people who don’t know a lot about the oyster industry,” Brame said. “Because unless you kind of come from that area, it’s pretty under wraps I feel like.”
Brame’s collection is not made of any new material but rather sourced from dead stock or scrap fabric. Some places she got her material from were SCRAP RVA, a fabric thrift shop in Virginia, and FABSCRAP, a shop that collects fabric that would have been thrown out but is reused and sold in Philadelphia and New York City.
Brame was required to create a senior collection to fulfill her Capstone requirement as a student in the Fashion and Design Department. She began to conceptualize her idea during her break last summer. Throughout the fall, her class was working on the first three to four looks of their collection, but Brame did not stop at the end of her fall semester.
“You didn’t have to do more than that, I then took my winter break and made six more,” Brame said. “So I had a total of ten looks in it, I was wrapped up though probably the day of the fashion show.”
Brame participated in Synergy all throughout college, starting freshman year during the COVID-19 pandemic. She said that the club has grown during her time from a video-recorded fashion show to a bigger one off-campus.
She shared snippets of her collection on social media, but the full collection was shown for the first time at the Synergy Fashion Show during UDFW. After working on it for almost a year, Brame expressed that she felt a lot of emotions throughout the process because everything was happening so fast.
Now that it was complete, everyone got the chance to see what Brame had created. On top of her family and friends that attended the show, Brame said she received positive feedback from hundreds of people she did not know and described the experience as validating as a designer.
“Especially for shows like that where there are tons of people you have no idea who they are,” Brame said.
During the show, she also achieved her goal of winning the “Best In Show” Award for her Capstone.
As she approaches graduation, Brame plans to start her own company and continue to work on her brand. She is currently working part-time as a designer to help her grow her connections and gain more experience in the fashion industry.
Brame is also currently working on custom pieces and hopes to manufacture a solid product. In her spare time, she wants to be able to explore and figure out who she is as a designer and what she wants her company to look like.
Brame hopes that awareness of fashion continues to spread at the university. She believes that it should not be overlooked, but rather be seen as something that can be impactful.
“It is growing so, so rapidly on campus and I think they have so many good professors and faculty and so many students who are really motivated to kind of make a difference in the fashion industry, whether that’s sustainability, inclusivity or things like that,” she said.