By Gianna Bartolini ’15

Senior Samantha Berger may seem like your average student, taking rigorous classes and playing as the captain of the soccer team, but there is more to her than meets the eye. For the last eight years, she has been working towards her goal of becoming a fashion designer. Beginning in the fourth grade, she was designing and creating paper doll dresses, but it wasn’t until the seventh grade that she leaned to sew real-life models of her sketches. Since then, she has been perfecting her craft, attending a pre-college program at New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) for three weeks this past summer.

“It was awesome,” Berger said about her experience at FIT, “I stayed on the Upper East Side and took classes Monday through Thursday. On Fridays and the weekends I explored the city and did internships and interviews with industry professionals including Ralph Lauren and Tori Burch.” Meeting these people has given her much to think about in terms of her future plans, not only for college, but for a career. While she has already been accepted to Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), her top choices for college are Central St. Martins in London and Parsons The New School for Design, the number one schools in the world and in the United States for fashion design, respectively. Wherever she goes, however, she will be taking a number of classes designed to improve her skills in designing, sewing, and creating clothing and textiles. After college, her dream job is to continue designing clothes. “I want to have my own fashion label, or design under a famous one,” Berger elaborated. “I want to travel and be inspired!”

Although she is not a professional yet, that does not deter her from sewing and designing clothing for herself and practicing her sewing skills. Berger has been working in the costume shop for Sherwood’s Rock and Roll Revival for the past three years, and currently has internships at The Look Boutique and Designs by Nicole in Olney, where she mainly works in a retail environment and learns the basics of running a business in the fashion world. For her college portfolio, she has also been working very hard sketching, designing, creating and photographing her work so that schools can get an accurate perception of her abilities. One of those pieces, a yellow blouse, was actually featured in The Warrior’s October 2014 fashion spread. Of Berger’s work, her personal favorites include a stained-glass dress and a navy pea coat.

Based on her past experience in fashion and her drive to be the best, Samantha Berger seems to be on the path to becoming very successful in whatever she sets out to do in the future.