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Well, maybe youre not a budding Diane von Furstenberg, but your daughter might be. Local fashion guru Lisa Hynes-Rosenfeld can help stoke the flames of fashion creativity for your kids. Her So You Want To Be a Fashion Designer program is an extra-curricular goldmine for children with an interest in fashion.
Lisa left the international corporate landscape of fashion to raise her four children, all boys. But I had so many friends who would say to me, My daughter is so interested in fashion. Can you teach her something about design? And I thought it would be great to work with girls, because I have all boys, says the FIT grad. So, I started to do a few after school sessions. I contacted the Greenwich Arts Council. I went to the city and got all this designer fabric for the first group of girls, who came in 2008. Lisa taught the girls the ins and outs of fashion illustration, color trends and portfolio building. I showed them how to use the Prisma markers designers use. And when we finished the month-long after school workshop, they asked me, When does the next one start? So, I thought, I guess Im doing another.
From there, a star business was born. Lisa now offers regular fashion design instruction to girls from ages 5-15. But mostly it ends up being girls from about 9 to 13 years-old, she says. We build holiday dresses out of velvet and silk charmeuse. We do fashion shows. What the girls make in these workshops isnt slapped together with glue. They design and create pieces theyre proud of and want to wear.
Because being a business owner and mother of four leaves Lisa with an abundance of free time, she also serves as the Vice President of Design for GoodTrueBeautiful, Inc., a brand created to benefit the Golden Phoenix Foundation. Its a non-profit started by a childhood friend of mine. The Golden Phoenix Foundations mission is to develop and create global initiatives to end child abandonment.
Really, the best part of what I do is seeing that a child has changed. Sometimes they come in shy and unsure of themselves. But when they leave, theyve created something. Theyve brought an idea to life. Watching that happen is incredible.
If Lisa sounds like the perfect match for your mini Coco Chanel, youre in luck. Shes offering a winter camp this month. All the details are on her website.
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