Summer Vang juggles a busy life. When she isn’t at school, work, or working on maintaining friendships and her relationship, she goes above and beyond watching Netflix and reading books. Vang sits at her sewing machine and creates wearable art.

Fashion designing and creating is something Vang was never taught and never considered as a career.

“You know as a little girl you always want to be a princess then you want to be a teacher and then you want to be like the fashion designer and everything like that kind of that was me when I was little,”Vang said.

She decided in high school to use her aunt’s sewing machine to learn to create her own clothing. With no instruction or patterns, Vang would turn her own clothing inside out and study the seams before recreating them with fabric and her own two hands.

“It was just more of flipping everything inside out and looking at it until I got the gist of it down. So then I started designing just simple things. And then I did my prom dress and that’s when I started designing.”

Since then Vang has created a spring line featured at the Lasting Impressions fashion show, and is in the process of creating another spring line for the locally run Spring into Fashion Show.

Her style, she shared, aims to break the standard norms for fashion.

“It’s not fast fashion, basically where you buy it in style and then next season begins anew and you never wear it again. Thirty years later, it will be back again and it’s like ‘Darn it I should never have thrown those out.’ I wanted to create something that’s more versatile.”

At the Lasting Impressions show she defied standards by creating a line of women’s formal wear that avoided the staple of dresses.

Vand said, “I thought like formal wear, and women empowerment and decided we’re going to do fun pant suits. It wasn’t anything like all the grey and the navy blue working suits. I had bright colors, so the primary colors red yellow and blue.”

Vang’s favorite thing to do in her designing is to use a pop of color to make the design stand out.

In her own life she strives to include color in her wardrobe. Working as a waitress, she must wear all black for her job. However, when Vang dresses up, her personal style appears.

“I challenge myself. I need a little more color in my life. I do wear color here and there. I guess it’s based on the location, so on most occasions like special occasions that I’m going to a fashion show, you’ll see me in bright colors.”

Even when wearing all black, Vang’s bright blue hair gives her a pop of color to distinguish her from the crowd.

“I’m working on an embroidered short and beading. I’m learning beading but I think I’ve got the gist of it. I’m working on just a spring line, just a small one,” said Vang.

Vang’s new work was featured in the Spring Into Fashion Show hosted by the local magazine Outliving Style on Saturday, March 24th. The audience response to Vang’s designs was overwhelmingly positive and Vang is currently planning to release a fall line at Outliving Style’s fall show, which is planned to happen in September 2018.