Featured Students and Alumni

One of our TAM Alumni, Stacy Caballero, is a costume designer with Marvel Studios and worked on the new Black Panther Wakanda Forever film. She shares her story of finding success in Hollywood and her focus to mentor future costume designers at LSU.

“ In my last year of undergrad, I took a costume design class as an elective and it opened up a whole new world of design to me. ”

“ Once I chose [fashion design] there was no turning back … It’s a medium I can use to express myself, feelings, stories. Fashion is a language, and clothes are the way you communicate. ”

Apparel Design senior Kaleb Duncan is known by Kei Ai in the fashion community. His alias, which comes from the phonetic spelling of his first and middle initials, “serves as a fragmentation” of himself as a designer.

LSU students may know him as the cheerful and joking cashier in the On-The Geaux store in the Student Union, where he works full time. 

Duncan took a break from school to focus on his craft, and uses his job at the Student Union to support his fashion endeavors. He plans to go back to school in the Fall of 2023. “I had a lot going on and I wanted to focus on me being a designer, so I pulled back from LSU to recenter myself,” Duncan said.

Duncan’s interest in fashion started in 2016, during his junior year of high school. While in an advanced IB art class, he started experimenting with clothing and learned how to work a sewing machine. He continued to self-teach himself through trial and error.

“Once I chose [fashion design] there was no turning back … It’s a medium I can use to express myself, feelings, stories,” Duncan said. “Fashion is a language, and clothes are the way you communicate.”

When he first came to LSU, Duncan planned to study electrical engineering. He switched to fashion because he felt more comfortable with it, and saw aspects of engineering in fashion design.

“Fashion is just engineering with fabric. [Designer Issey Miyake] went to school for architecture, and he uses his architecture and shows it in his work, and I feel that we are similar in that aspect,” Duncan said. “It’s blending two supposedly opposite fields into one beautiful product.”

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Formerly an LSU TAM Apparel Design student, Madi Meserole had the amazing privilege to have her designs shown by Flying Solo during Paris Fashion Week! The show took place at La Galerie Bourbon, a salon located a block away from the Arc De Triomphe, on September 30th, 2021. Her inspired designs caught the eye of both the Marie Claire Italia and Elle Italia publications and were featured in their respective magazines. 

The collection, named Optical Emotions, is a story of human feeling, celebrating the brain and how it processes the very emotions each of us feel and go through on a daily basis. Made of an avant-garde mix of velvets & vinyls, Optical Emotions is comprised of 8 total looks - each inspired and named after a unique emotion. The entire collection took just under a year to produce and was all made by hand. 

Madi now owns her own womenswear label, MEZ Atelier, and continues her work in Austin, Texas and is creating garments for clients that range from ready-to-wear to custom couture ball gowns.

Suzanne Perron St. Paul was featured in the January 2020 episode of LSU in NOLA.

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LSU alumnae Chelsey Blankenship and Annie Claire Bass use their southern style to grow their business.

The sisters started SoSis Boutique online in 2014. Blankenship, who also works in social media marketing and website development, uses her mass communication degree to help build their online presence.

While Blankenship uses her mass communication degree to help advertise the boutique, Bass uses her degree in fashion merchandising to buy and style for the business. The two sisters use their proximity to the University in promoting their brand and choosing the most appealing merchandise.

Southern sisters use their LSU degrees to build their business.

Originally from Austin, Madi decided to debut her first collection, Metamorphosis, in her home city in May of 2019. The collection was inspired by details of a butterfly wing as observed under a microscope. The contemporary show included 9 full looks consisting of iridescent bell bottoms, tunics, tabbed skirts and matching separates. While it was a lot of fun to do her own thing and a complete learning experience, putting together a show on her own came with it’s own unique set of frustrations and challenges. The show wouldn't have been possible without the support of her family and friends. At the end of the day, being able to watch her looks come to fruition and finally walk down the runway was a wonderful reward and payoff in itself. "With the experience I gained from this, I have a total new found respect for those in the fashion production side of the industry and highly encourage anyone wanting to branch out and do their own thing to take the challenge and go for it!" -Madison Meserole

Fashionably Austin published an article about Madi's collection on their site as well. 

FASHIONABLY AUSTIN ARTICLE

Owner and Designer at Natasha Marie Bridal. Natasha has 10+ years of experience in the bridal industry and 20 years of sewing experience. She has a Fashion Design Degree from LSU's Apparel Design program, has interned with New Orleans couturier designer Suzanne Perron St. Paul, completed a fashion field study in China, designed for former First Lady of Louisiana Supriya Jindal, and donated a custom red gown for the American Heart Association, Baton Rouge Chapter. 

Ashley Twigg and Divya Patel, both Apparel Design seniors, attended The Fashion Group International Scholarship Day held at the Dallas Trade Mart. Ashley is pictured here with her garment which was on display in the Grand Pavilion. The event which hosts a design competition awarding scholarship funds was attended by apparel design and merchandising students from universities across the country.

BATON ROUGE - Fashion was front and center in New York City last week, and LSU junior Katie Brunet experienced it like a celebrity. Brunet, an apparel design major from Baton Rouge, earned the trip to New York Fashion Week after she was selected by LSU Textiles, Apparel Design and Merchandising faculty. The immersive experience in New York City, hosted by IMG College Licensing and IMG’s fashion events division, included fashion shows and networking events at companies like Victoria’s Secret Pink.

“Attending New York Fashion Week is the dream of anyone in the industry, and it has been a personal dream of mine for many years. Getting to experience that in addition to being given so many networking opportunities and invaluable experiences was something I definitely did not want to pass up,” Brunet said. Brunet was one of 17 students participating, from 13 different universities around the country.

“ Attending New York Fashion Week is the dream of anyone in the industry, and it has been a personal dream of mine for many years. Getting to experience that in addition to being given so many networking opportunities and invaluable experiences was something I definitely did not want to pass up. ”

Alumna Suzanne Perron St. Paul has designed gowns for celebrities, brides, débutantes and Mardi Gras royalty. She recently gave the LSU Golden Girls a new look.

LSU College of Agriculture students in Dr. Casey Stannard's TAM 4037 Draping class made garments from recycled tent fabric.