Technical Design student Sidney Nobleza ’18 took her plea to heart. Breast cancer, she learned, is a common illness. Each year, nearly 240,000 women in the United States are diagnosed. For her spring capstone project, Nobleza designed a compression bra, T-shirt, and dress that could be worn by women recovering from a mastectomy or breast reduction surgery.
For the fashionable Katagiri, who is completing a millinery certificate at the college, style was part of recovery. She keeps a blog, Heal in Heels, about her experience. Medical garments are notoriously unappealing. For example, the compression bra she wore after surgery was pale pink with flowers. “That’s not my style,” she said. She craved sophisticated colors, patterns, and silhouettes. “During recovery days,” she wrote on the blog, “I had basically no social life, no makeup, and no hairdo. I was getting low self-esteem. Dressing up brought back my good energy!”
Nobleza was inspired by Katagiri’s look. “She was always wearing something interesting.” Her design for her professor has an elegant bat-wing silhouette, and can be worn four ways.
After graduation, Nobleza took a position as a product development assistant at Kate Spade. Katagiri is creating a business proposal for the project, which Nobleza supports with design expertise. Katagiri has bold ambitions: “My goal is to eliminate the border between cancer fashion and fashion.”
