Arts & Communications: Fashion Designer
Arts & Communications
Fashion Designer: Allison Izu Song
By Mike Yoshiura • Photos by Scott T. Kubo
Many local businesses attribute their success to creating a niche market for their products. Allison Izu Song, 31, found her place in Hawai‘i’s fashion industry by tailoring a denim line to fit petite women like herself.
“I would go shopping and try on 20 different pairs of jeans, and if I was lucky, maybe one pair would fit me right,” says Allison, who always had trouble finding clothes to accent her petite, 5-foot-2-inch frame.
This fashionista’s denim line, Alisonizu, targets women 5 feet 4 inches and under. It was designed to empower women, making them feel beautiful and secure about their bodies (and threads). Allison is even in the process of starting her own nonprofit organization to improve the self-esteem and self-image of Hawai‘i’s women.
To create her unique denim patterns she works with different petite body types—curvy, athletic, boyish, long legs, long body, etc. To flatter them all, Allison raises inseams and creates proportionate waist-knee-hip-ankle ratios.
Allison’s passion for fashion started at age 14, with a beginner sewing class. She learned how to make patterns and select fabrics, but more importantly, it got her thinking about starting her own clothing line.
When Allison got to high school at Sacred Hearts Academy, she looked for fashion-focused classes, but there weren’t any courses specifically geared toward aspiring fashion designers. She figured that the next best thing would be to refine her sketching skills in art classes. There she learned the importance of human anatomy and proportions, color theory, rendering types and textures.
After her high school graduation, Allison
enrolled at the University of Hawai‘i. She com-pleted her liberal arts credits in the fall of 1996, and immediately left for the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York. The technical school’s one-year program featured accelerated courses, which kept Allison entrenched in her studies from sun up ‘til sundown. In addition to class work, she took advantage of internships that allowed her to work backstage in some of the Big Apple’s über posh fashion shows.
Allison returned to Hawai‘i in 1998 to make her mark on the local fashion industry. After a lot of planning and experimenting, she officially launched her denim line, Allisonizu, in 2007.
“I did everything from wedding dresses to handmade T-shirts,” she says. “I thought denim was going to be the easiest, but it’s not. There’s so much competition out there.”
Her fall 2008 denim line will hit stores this October, and can be found at local boutiques like Rocabella, Split Obsession and The Butik. For spring 2009, Allison plans to launch her line in Los Angeles and Canada. For more information, visit www.allisonizu.com.
Although Allison’s denim line is fairly new to the local fashion industry, she has already created a buzz here in the Islands. Most recently, Pacific Business News awarded her a winning spot on its “Forty Under 40 of 2008” list. “Making the list was not something that I strived for, but it gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of great people,” she says. “Fashion design has opened up so many doors for me, and I encourage more designers to come out and be a part of the industry. Hawai‘i needs more local designers.”