“Sustainability and empathy are our future.”
Jacob Olmedo, BFA Fashion Design ’17 + MFA Textiles ’20, speaks about what scholarship support has meant to him.
Jacob Olmedo is a first year graduate student in the MFA Textiles program who also completed his BFA in Fashion Design at Parsons. His interests in sustainable textiles have colored his undergraduate and graduate experiences.
After I graduated from Parsons in 2017 with my BFA in Fashion Design, I realized that textiles were the basis of most of my design ideas. Textiles are such a large part of sustainability and I decided I wanted to dig deeper.
When I graduated from Parsons, I won the Future Textiles Award and was the runner up for both the Dorothy Waxman Talking Textiles Award and the Fashion and Technology Award. I also won the Healthy Materials Competition in 2017, and have collaborated with their lab for NYC Design Week. In 2017, I participated in Unleash in Denmark, where 1000 global makers come together to work on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. I have been the head of embroidery and beading teams at Jahnkoy and Omondi, and I taught workshops for middle and high schoolers in Wisconsin on textiles, fashion, and sustainability.
My scholarship support at The New School truly means everything to me. I would not be able to pursue my MFA without it. I am from a small town in Wisconsin and my family lived paycheck to paycheck. In 2013, I was lucky enough to receive scholarship support to attend Parsons for my undergraduate studies. My life has changed drastically since then. I was the first in my family to complete a college degree, I graduated with double honors, and received awards for my thesis work. Since then, I have been on a mission to change the way we think about fashion, textiles, and the industry in general. Sustainability and empathy are our future.
I love working and experimenting. I work with plants and fibers to make textiles and garment forms. I wonder how we can reunite ourselves with nature after we have become so detached, and that we are now facing climate change. The privilege of attending The New School for my MFA means the world to me. I now can change the world for the better, and I will not waste any time or resources.
