09/11/2026
# The Creative Mind Needs a Place to Belong
Finding your identity is difficult, especially when you are young.
The world around you is often in a hurry to tell you what “normal” looks like. Parents, teachers and friends naturally guide you toward what they know and understand. Be practical. Get good grades. Choose a safe profession. Follow the path that has already been proven.
But what happens when your mind doesn't work that way?
What happens when you see possibilities where other people see rules? When you want to take something apart simply to understand how it was made? When fabric, color, shape, music or movement communicates something to you that you cannot quite explain?
Creative children can sometimes feel like the odd ones in the room.
I was fortunate. I was born into a creative family, so my curiosity was largely considered normal—even when my family occasionally thought I was crazy because I always wanted to find out how far I could take an idea.
I devoted my life to creation and design.
At the same time, I was good at mathematics. I participated in math olympiads at school, mostly because my close friends were doing them. Both later became engineers. I never particularly cared about mathematics, but it felt logical to me, so it wasn't difficult.
Reading and writing were another story.
Letters seemed to jump around in my mind, and I didn't really begin reading comfortably until around fourth grade. I was born left-handed, and my elementary school teacher insisted that I write with my right hand. What should have been a natural part of childhood became frightening and stressful.
There is probably some dyslexia in the way my brain works. But there was also something else: an education system trying to make a child perform in the way it believed a child was supposed to perform.
Years later, I began to understand that experience differently.
# # Twenty Years of Watching Creative Children
When I founded the **New England Fashion & Design Association**, I wasn't thinking about any of this.
I simply wanted to teach.
But after nearly twenty years of working with children, teenagers, young adults and their families, I started noticing something I could no longer ignore.
Again and again, parents would tell me that their child struggled somewhere in traditional school. Some had diagnosed learning differences; others simply didn't seem to thrive in conventional classrooms.
Then I would watch those same children walk into our fashion studio.
And something changed.
Give them fabric.
Give them a sewing machine.
Ask them to draw a figure.
Show them how a two-dimensional pattern becomes a three-dimensional garment.
Ask them to solve a construction problem.
Suddenly, the child who supposedly had difficulty concentrating could spend hours perfecting a sleeve.
The student who didn't feel successful in an academic classroom could understand proportion intuitively.
One student could draw beautifully but struggled with sewing. Another could construct almost anything but didn't consider themselves an artist. Another could do both. Another arrived without an obvious technical strength but possessed extraordinary imagination.
Fashion gave all of them different doors through which to enter.
That taught me something important:
**Intelligence does not always reveal itself in the same language.**
# # Then I Started Listening to the Mothers
There is another conversation I have had countless times.
A mother brings her child to our school and looks around the studio with enormous curiosity.
Then she says quietly:
“I always wanted to do this.”
I ask what happened.
Usually the answer is some variation of:
“My parents told me to study something practical.”
So she did.
Life moved forward. Education, career, marriage, children, responsibilities. Now she is standing in our studio watching her child touch the dream she once put away.
I have seen that look too many times to dismiss it.
And unfortunately, I sometimes see the cycle beginning again.
A child demonstrates real interest or talent in design, but the parents hesitate.
*Is fashion a real career?*
*Can you actually make a living doing this?*
*Shouldn't they study something more practical?*
Of course parents want security for their children. I understand that completely.
But there is an irony here.
Everyone gets dressed every morning.
Behind what we wear is an enormous professional ecosystem of designers, patternmakers, technical designers, product developers, textile designers, sample makers, 3D designers, production specialists, merchandisers, entrepreneurs and craftspeople.
Clothing doesn't magically appear in stores.
Someone imagined it.
Someone designed it.
Someone engineered the pattern.
Someone made the prototype.
Someone figured out how it could be manufactured.
Creativity and practicality are not opposites.
**Professional creativity requires both imagination and discipline.**
# # We Have Undervalued Making
Somewhere along the way, we began separating intellectual achievement from making things with our hands.
Craft became less prestigious. Vocational education was too often treated as a second choice rather than another form of serious education.
Yet we celebrate the finished work.
We stand in museums looking at extraordinary garments.
We admire architecture, furniture, paintings, films, textiles and beautifully designed objects.
We celebrate designers such as Alexander McQueen because they were able to transform deeply personal ideas into work that moved millions of people.
We admire the result while sometimes discouraging young people from pursuing the education required to create it.
There is a contradiction there.
# # This Is Why RED Fashion School Exists
At **RED Fashion School**, we are looking for a particular kind of student.
Not necessarily the student dreaming about an Ivy League acceptance letter.
Not necessarily the student with the perfect academic record.
We are looking for the student who wants to **make**.
The student who is curious about how clothing works.
The student who looks at fabric and sees possibilities.
The student who wants to draw, cut, drape, sew, construct, experiment, fail, correct, rethink and create again.
And we take that student seriously.
We don't believe creativity means avoiding rigor. Quite the opposite.
Talent needs training.
Imagination needs technique.
Ideas need craftsmanship.
A beautiful sketch is only the beginning. We want students to understand how an idea travels from imagination to paper, from paper to pattern, from pattern to fabric, and eventually into a professionally executed garment or collection.
That is why our education is intensely hands-on.
We teach students to think creatively **and** technically.
Because the future of fashion doesn't need people who simply know how to follow instructions.
It needs people who know how to think.
# # Protect the Human Part
Technology is changing our industry incredibly quickly. AI can generate images in seconds. 3D technology can visualize garments before they are sewn. Manufacturing continues to become more automated.
Those tools are extraordinary, and our students should learn to use them.
But technology makes something else even more valuable:
**the human imagination behind the tool.**
Curiosity.
Taste.
Judgment.
Emotion.
Craftsmanship.
The strange idea nobody else would have considered.
The willingness to ask, *What if?*
That is the part of humanity I want us to protect.
After twenty years of teaching, I no longer see fashion education simply as teaching someone how to make clothes.
I see it as giving creative people a place where their way of thinking has value.
A place where curiosity isn't something that needs to be corrected.
A place where working with your hands is intelligent.
A place where being different can become an advantage—but where difference is also supported with serious professional training.
And perhaps most importantly, a place where a young person can discover:
**There isn't something wrong with the way I think. I simply needed to find what I could do with it.**
That is why I continue to teach.
That is why we created RED Fashion School.
And that is why we are looking for the next generation of makers, thinkers and designers who want to keep the deeply human act of creation alive.
**Irina Simeonova**
Founder & Director
**RED Fashion School**
Fashiondesign
