As a young child, Grace Choi created all kinds of garments for her Power Rangers figurines, like pants, dresses, and a “crazy number of skirts.”
“You know how children mimic their parents?” she asks. “My parents ran a dry cleaners, so I kind of mimicked them.”
And it wasn’t just her Power Rangers. My Little Pony, Barbie, G.I. Joe—all of them were subject to what she jokingly calls her “sartorial proclivity.”
Today the twentysomething designer based in New York’s WeWork NoMad space, uses her skills at CLO Virtual Fashion, where she helps create true-to-life simulations of clothing.
“3D is the future of fashion,” says Choi, and “to be a part of a company at the forefront of this is super exciting!”
CLO offers three products: CLO Enterprise, focused on larger fashion brands; CLO Atelier, for independent designers and small businesses; and Marvelous Designer, for the computer games and animated films. Familiar with the popular game Assassin’s Creed or films like The Hobbit trilogy? Then you’ve already seen Marvelous Designer’s work in action.
Choi says she’s always had a vivid imagination. As a young child, she wanted to be a unicorn.
“I didn’t realize they weren’t a real thing,” she says with a laugh.
By the time she was 12, Choi had decided she wanted to be a singer. As she graduated high school, she was playing piano, violin, clarinet, and guitar.
“Whether it’s been singing, dancing, acting or creating, fashion just seemed like a natural progression,” says Choi.
Why fashion, though?
“Fashion is always changing,” she explains. “There’s something incredible about creating a work that visually expresses your translation of the world.”
As a student at Cornell University, Choi recognized this trend toward 3D technology in the fashion industry and connected with CLO.
“The rest is history,” she says.’
Choi learned on the job, combining traditional fashion skills like tracing out patterns with cutting-edge technology like 3D rendering. Choi says she loves that the job offers instant gratification, since you “get to see your designs come together in real-time!”
Asked what piece of advice she’d give her younger self, Choi says, “Don’t take everything so seriously.” It’s something she wishes she kept in mind throughout the years.
“I went through the usual trials and tribulations: bullying, rejection, awkwardness, failure,” she says. “It’s all water off a duck’s back now, but if I had taken everything less seriously then, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache.”
Photos: Katelyn Perry