Creating Reality

Ben Ellis has always loved to design clothes. He's been designing them all his life—he just didn't know it. His earliest recollections involve fashion. He remembers pulling out a fresh sheet of paper and crayons, drawing his favorite superheroes and adorning their suits and capes with pops of color. The Alaska fashion designer recently showed an eight-piece collection at New York Fashion Week this September. Only a handful of students were selected from his school, San Francisco's Academy of Art University, to show. For Ellis, the road from Alaska to the tents of Bryant Park has been a journey he didn't always realize he was on.

"I grew up in a family of bush pilots and firemen—so fashion, fashion design, was thought of as kind of frivolous," said Ellis. "But I've just always done it."

Ellis grew up in Anchorage, but spent many summers with family up north in Nabesna, living, working and exploring the glacial landscapes in the shadows of the Wrangell Mountains—something that would later influence his art and his worldview—and eventually, play a role in his collection at New York Fashion Week.

After high school, Ellis left Alaska. He became more interested and active in art—design, sculpture, visual art—but he kept circling back to fashion.

"Fashion is one of the instruments for creating reality," said Ellis. "Depending on what you wear that day, it can affect your mood, it can affect how people interact with you, it affects how you interact with the world."

Ellis believes in the transformative power of fashion—how one piece of clothing can make a person feel. He loves how interactive the art form is and how fast it moves and weaves itself in and out of every industry, group or culture.

"It's so interactive on so many levels—from the visual to the tactile, to wearing it, to viewing it in a museum, to making—it's, it's just my favorite," Ellis said. "I never felt that way as a painter or a muralist or a graphic designer. I feel like as a fashion designer I can play more with the world around me and have a voice."

Over the course of his career as an artist, he'd designed a few clothing collections—mostly T-shirts with graphic designs on them—some of which were sold in Anchorage. But as his visual art career was waning and he was looking to the horizon for the next move in life, he kept circling back to fashion. So he decided to switch it up. Really switch it up.

He moved to South America. And he got himself an apprenticeship with a seamstress in Colombia who barely spoke English. He struggled with Spanish, but the two of them made it work. And he learned the basics, learned how to sew, to feel the textile in his hand, work with a needle and thread.

"I was just really cutting my teeth, learning how to sew," said Ellis. "As frustrating as that could be, I still loved it—and kept pushing myself to do more."

After four years of living there and apprenticing, he had a "now or never" moment and applied to fashion school. Initially, he started online, but quickly realized the only way to really learn the craft was to be hands-on. So he moved back to the states to attend AAU. When he arrived, he heard about the school's selection of a handful of students to show a collection at New York Fashion Week—and Ellis set his sights on being one of those students. In the months before New York Fashion Week he was still unsure he would be picked, but eventually, the call came.

"Having a goal like that, met and realized—it's one of the coolest experiences of my life," Ellis said.

Ellis said he drew inspiration for his collection at New York Fashion Week from all aspects of his life. From his days as an athlete and instructing yoga to artists like Matisse and Kandinsky, but none influenced him as much as the changing environment of the rugged landscapes from his northern childhood summers.

"One of my initial inspirations was sustainability, being a responsible designer, being from Alaska," said Elis. "I personally can see how things are changing. I can see how our landscape is changing and talking to my family and their experiences how it's changing."

Currently, nationwide and globally the fashion industry is having a moment, much like the food industry experienced about 10 years ago when the pendulum swung from fast food and big box grocers back to a farm-to-table model and people really started considering where their food came from and how it was grown. The fashion world is starting to have that conversation—how to create a sustainable and socially responsible industry. Backlash from "fast fashion" brands like Forever 21, H&M and Zara that constantly churn out new product every few months have inspired smaller, local brands and designers to create higher quality products at fewer intervals, hoping to slow the frenzied churn of the fast fashion brands.

But fashion is big business. According to the video The Problem with Fast Fashion by The Huffington Post, the fashion industry rakes in 1.2 trillion dollars each year, with $250 billion from the U.S. market alone. The average American, according to the video, generates 82 pounds of textile waste each year. Fast fashion items are worn an average of five times and often thrown out 35 days after purchase. The video also explains that besides the consumer waste, the environmental impacts are huge. The clothing industry is the second highest pollutant of clean water worldwide and the cotton industry uses more pesticides than any other crop. All of this has weighed heavily on Ellis and his desire to incite change within the industry.

"Fashion is the second or the third—depending on where you read—most polluted industry in the world," Ellis said. "And I don't want to contribute to that. It's irresponsible." Ellis is passionate on the subject of sustainability and marrying the industry with environmentally friendly and socially responsible practices.

"I think it's kind of like the tobacco industry or the sugar industry—we're just waking up to how bad it really is," Ellis said.

Ellis graduated last year with a bachelor of fine arts in Menswear Design and recently moved to New York City to intern with NICOPANDA, a fashion label headed by Nicola Formichetti, known for being the creative director of brands like Diesel and MUGLER and who worked as Lady Gaga's stylist during her Bad Romance era of provocative fashion. He thinks he would like to have his own fashion label at some point, but right now he's just enjoying his experience and hoping that he can be part of a conversation in an industry that is slowly starting to change.

"I want to be part of the solution," Ellis said. "I believe success is 'more are you satisfied'? Are you satisfied with your life—with what you've done and who you have in it—versus a label. And I'm in the business of labels."

This article was first published in 61°North – The Design Issue. Contact the editor, Jamie Gonzales, at jgonzales@alaskadispatch.com.