Apparel | Thursday, September 08, 2011

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AND THE WINNER IS . . . JUSIL CARROLL

By Greg Wang

NEW YORK – Jusil Carroll, 34, a 2011 Bachelor of Fine Arts graduate from New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology, took first place in the Supima Design Competition held earlier today.

In front of the industry elite who packed the Studio tent at Lincoln Center—as well as an international audience watching the live broadcast on the websites of Fashion Week Daily and The New York Times—the native of Busan, South Korea was presented with a $10,000 check from Supima by Bravo TV star Rachel Zoe, who acted as the master of ceremonies for the competition’s live runway finale.

This year’s edition of the Supima Design Competition, the first to be staged as part of New York Fashion Week, followed a “best of the best” format in which America’s top design schools—FIT, Pratt, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Savannah College of Art and Design—were each asked to nominate two graduating seniors as finalists. All eight finalists were then given luxury fabrics made with Supima Cotton and asked to create five-piece capsule collections of women’s evening wear.

Carroll’s winning collection (as seen above right and below) was inspired by the 1999 film The Blair Witch Project “because each person interprets the witch differently and everyone is left with a sense of mystery and thrill.” During the Supima Design Competition, her FIT faculty mentor was Professor Lisa Donofrio.

As an undergraduate, Carroll’s honors included the $25,000 Liz Claiborne Scholarship Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2010; the AFT International Fashion Sketch Contest in 2011; and the Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence from the State University of New York.

Carroll began her career as an illustrator and worked as a design assistant before matriculating at FIT, a school she selected because “in addition to its reputation and its location, it was one of the few schools to allow an intensive focus on knitwear.”

“In addition to its design innovation and superb execution, Jusil’s collection really rethought the possibilities of luxury cotton . . . the judges were blown away,” explained Buxton Midyette, Supima’s VP of Marketing, who judged the competition along with supermodel Coco Rocha, Bloomingdale’s executive Kevin Harter, designer Charlotte Ronson, and Gilt Groupe founder Alexandra Wilkis Wilson.