FIT Newsroom

Visionaries of Fibers: Keel Labs

The lives of Fashion Design alums Aleks Gosiewski ’17 and Tessa Callaghan ’16 have undergone a sea change since their winning the inaugural Biodesign Challenge in 2016. At the time, their student team won the international competition, which envisions the future of biotechnology, with a sustainability project—a yarn derived from seaweed. Now, less than a decade later, Gosiewski and Callaghan sit at the helm of Keel Labs, a growing sustainable materials start-up headquartered in the heart of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. It is here that the seaweed-based fiber they prototyped back at FIT gets spun into spools of Kelsun yarn. Read more about their work at hue.fitnyc.edu

In the Fashionista article “How to Dress Well on a Fashion Student Budget,” FIT students along with those from other fashion colleges talked about shopping buying secondhand and thrifted clothing and avoiding fast fashion. “Studying at FIT has really helped me to understand quality versus quantity,” Entrepreneurship student Imani Woodard said. “When you’re a teenager and you want to replicate what’s on the runway, you don’t understand the impact. As a student, I’ve learned that I can engage in trends in a more sophisticated way.”