Photograph courtesy Jessy Zimmer
It was fashion designer Jessy Zimmer’s Midwestern roots that influenced her senior thesis “Fox Hunt Pageant” and landed the collection on Vogue earlier this year. The Edgewood native and recent graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design was one of 60 graduating designers whose work was shown at the school’s annual SCAD Fashion Showcase in May, which showed nearly 200 looks.
Photography courtesy SCAD
“Fox Hunt Pageant” explores the feelings of anger, boredom, and complacency that Zimmer envisions were felt by the wives of aristocratic men, left behind during their husbands’ fox hunts. The collection reimagines equestrian menswear, using fabrics like tweed and patterns like houndstooth and herringbone, feminized with crystals, pearls, and silk, to imagine a sisterhood where these women embarked on a hunt of their own. Each look is made to represent an escape from the domestic spheres the women found themselves in.
Cincinnati Magazine sat with Zimmer to discuss her history in fashion design, the inspirations behind her senior thesis, and her reaction to appearing in one of the nation’s highest-profile fashion magazines fresh out of college.
Photograph courtesy Jessy Zimmer
How did your background in fashion lead you to where you are today?
I feel like I’ve always been a creative girl. Growing up, I was very involved in Kenton County’s 4-H program, and my grandma actually led one of our craft clubs, so I was always painting [and] drawing. I learned how to sew when I was around 10 and that was through a 4-H sewing class. I’d always enjoyed sewing and making clothes and things like that. When it came to high school and deciding on a career, I was like, ‘What would I actually like to do for the rest of my life?’ That’s how I landed on fashion design, and how I ended up at SCAD.
You use animals as inspiration for some of your other collections. Why is this a recurring theme in your work?
I’ve always also been an animal person. My family raised rabbits, we’ve had chickens, we’ve had all sorts of animals, and my mom used to raise sheep, so it’s kind of drawing inspiration from my family. When it came to “Fox Hunt Pageant,” I was kind of reflecting on Kentucky, my home—I would ride horses when I was a little girl—and deciding on an aesthetic that I thought reflected me as a designer.
Tell me about the story behind “Fox Hunt Pageant.”
We spend the summer before our senior year developing three different concept books … “Fox Hunt Pageant” was one that I was pretty sure I was going to pick by the time I started it. That summer, I read Charlotte Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, and I started on top of this whole equestrian kind of vision and aesthetic. I started reflecting on feminism, particularly first-wave feminism and classism. That led me to the narrative of aristocratic wives left at home while their husbands embark on a fox hunt. I took inspiration from old equestrian menswear and used heritage fabrics like tweeds to kind of weave this story of women donning equestrian riding clothes in this really high fashion way in order to push a narrative of breaking out of the domestic sphere.
The pageant motifs in this collection are symbolic of domestic control, but how are you changing that representation as you include them in the final outfits that aim to embody this sense of sisterhood?
I imagine these aristocratic wives, they’re probably raised as debutantes … in what might have before, like in a lot of female-led spaces, been a competition between them. I think female relationships are so incredibly close that they can very quickly become something that is like a sisterhood. So, this idea of them all deciding, ‘Okay, maybe we’re all trying to outclass each other,’ [maybe we are] trying to push this classist, really high fashion luxury narrative, and then pushing it into something that makes it a little bit more modern, forming that sisterhood, and taking the extra horses in the barn, and getting out while still looking fabulous doing it.
The pearls, crystals, and silk you said were there to feminize the garments, but were there any reasons you chose them specifically?
I chose my silk because I wanted to produce a type of fur texture without actually using fur. All my fox-fur prints that you see are actually a print that I developed that I had printed on to silk charmeuse. From the first look, it really does look like fur, but it’s actually a really soft, delicate silk. All of the crystals and pearls on my garments are Swarovski product. Through SCAD they sponsored me and gave me $800 worth of crystals and pearls to cover my garments with.
Photograph courtesy Jessy Zimmer
I saw you worked with a range of silhouettes in your samples. How did you determine the final five?
It was a lot of working with my professor. I made probably 80 different sketches, and it was a matter of … finding the pieces that really spoke to me. All the other development kind of happens as I was doing it. We had to do mock ups of all of our looks, so as I was patterning and designing things with my muslin fabric, I would make little tweaks, like, ‘Oh, I actually really like the way a big shoulder is looking,’ and so different things got exaggerated as I got to see them on my fit models and on the dress form. When it came to some of my more masculine silhouettes with the large shoulders, I was thinking about a literal representation of a domestic sphere that a square shoulder wouldn’t be able to fit within. Hypothetically, this woman, my final pageant queen with the sash and the big blazer, it’s this suit set. She’s very polished and proud, but her shoulders would be bigger than any husband’s shoulders could possibly be in that jacket.
This was a very cohesive collection, but the green dress felt the most overtly feminine to me. What is the meaning behind this outfit?
Photograph courtesy Jessy Zimmer
Before we even started drawing the clothes, we had to make different fabric swatches and fabric manipulations. One of those was my suede leather swatch, where I wove different ribbons through it. Something about that felt so tactile, and a reflection on craft, and traditionally, women’s roles, that it felt important to include some sort of hand-woven element. It was definitely a labor of love where me and a few of my models and some underclassmen all got together and spent hours meticulously clipping these notches into my suede fabric and weaving the ribbons through. I feel it was kind of a testament to the community that my hypothetical aristocratic wives would have with each other, and I also felt that it was important to symbolize a more feminine element, because you don’t have to be masculine in order to be proud or to feel brave.
What was it like seeing this collection come off the page for the first time?
So rewarding. I tried to be very intentional once my garments were finished and completed, being very present during my photo shoots and my film, to really be a part of the process. One of the most rewarding moments for me was our exhibition night. I think there were 4,000 people who showed up from the community to see all of the fashion design seniors work. I was having women who were still in their teens and women all the way up to their 70s coming through and grabbing my garments, looking at them, and being like, ‘Oh my God, I would love this, I would love to wear this, this would make me feel so confident,’ and that was something that was really rewarding for me. Seeing actual people in the community who showed up to support the different fashion students and interacting with me and my work.
Being featured in Vogue is such a feat, especially as a young designer. What was that like?
The Vogue feature was so rewarding, and it’s this testament of, ‘Look, I did it, I made it.’… I came home for the Fourth of July weekend to go to Ft. Mitchell’s parade, and there was someone I met, she just finished her freshman year at SCAD, and she recognized me. She was like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been following you, you’re Jessy, and I saw your collection.’ It’s so rewarding having all of this publicity lead to people recognizing me in person.
Photograph courtesy Jessy Zimmer
Is there anything you are working on right now?
Currently, I’m working with SCAD to produce four of my garments for their luxury concept BAZAAR. So, hopefully I’ll have a line of my clothes in their storefront in Savannah this upcoming fall.
Where do you see yourself in the future with fashion?
I think I’ll always be a womenswear designer. I love designing women’s clothes, and right now I’m working at Anthropology as a design intern. They’re a brand that really prioritizes diversity and inclusion that caters to a lot of different age demographics in their design, which internally, has been something that’s so rewarding, designing for a company that prioritizes those things, which very much aligns with my design ethos. I’m hoping throughout the rest of my career to keep working for brands like this.
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