Saunders Ervin

Interviewed by Bryen Fabry Dorsam in the spring of 2022.

She looked fine to me, but then I could only see her from the shoulders up. When Saunders Ervin graduated from the Chicago Waldorf School, she moved to Paris, where she was taking a break from a current project to chat with me over Zoom. As a fashion designer, you might imagine that Saunders is always hyper-attentive to what she’s wearing, but she told me that’s not the case.

“I’m terrible. I’m wearing crocs right now!” She explained, “If you’re in fashion design you don’t always have enough time.”

It sounds true enough to me – we’d been trying to find each other for months, our schedules always conflicting. In fact, she pulled off one of her in-progress designs and changed into her regular clothing just before we started.

“Parsons Paris just started their Master’s degree program out here, and they asked me to come on for a project.” The project they’re working on is a collaboration with Versace. Saunders and the others are making individual collections “based on two garments that we were given from Versace’s archive. We got to go to Milan, we got to see the archive, see the headquarters, we got to meet Donatella herself – the queen! She’s a force of nature. I couldn’t feel more lucky, more excited to be a part of the program.”

Apparently, Donatella Versace is exactly like you’d imagine her to be. “Before she even came in the room, the mood shifted. It was like a storm coming. She busts in with three security guards: “Ciao!” It was amazing to be in her presence and to have the opportunity to study her.”

Before working with Parsons and Versace on this project, Saunders was an undergraduate at Parsons in Paris, but, initially, she wasn’t designing. “I went through a phase where I didn’t want to be a designer. In high school I was like, “I just want to be near it”. I didn’t even apply as a fashion design major; I applied to Parsons as a Strategic Design and Management major, which is like a business degree in design.”

Luckily, she says, a savvy professor redirected her into the design program, which is where she truly wanted to be. Her thesis collection, you can see for yourself, is absolutely stunning.

“I can tell you, one hundred percent, I would not be sitting here now, in Paris, without the experiences I’ve had [at CWS]. It opened my mind from the time I was a baby to living in my imagination, exploring that, and, most importantly, thanks to Carol Triggiano, listening to and telling stories. That’s what I still feel like I’m trying to learn to do in my work every day. When I start a new project, like with this one, I didn’t start with the archive of Versace I was given, I started with the story of Medusa – the story of her death and the way her children were born out of her neck – and I wouldn’t have the capacity to come at things that way had I not been trained through storytelling as a child.

“They always encouraged us so much to go with our imagination and strive to become what we were playing as kids. I look at my class and I’m just so proud to be a part of it, because so many of my classmates from kindergarten on are literally doing the things that they used to pretend they were as babies. You’ve got a kid who was obsessed with baseball who is now designing baseball stadiums in Boston [editor’s note: Shoutout to Ben Weingarten!], you’ve got writers and artists. It’s really cool to be one of many people who have been able to follow their dream.”

When I confessed to Saunders that, while I love Waldorf education, it’s not the first thing I think of when I think of high fashion, she laughed, but told me, “Fashion is self-expression and Waldorf is an expert on teaching kids how to self-express.”