People of Central: Nevaeh Banks

Story and photos by: Breanna Prince

It all started in fourth grade when Nevaeh Banks began designing clothes for her dolls. From there, she started learning how to hand sew.

“I would try to make clothes for my dolls out of paper,” she said. “For Christmas, we would have our gifts, and I would try to preserve the wrapping paper so I can make doll clothes out of it.”

Around fifth grade, she started losing passion for designing because she felt like it wasn’t getting anywhere.

“I never got a sewing machine, and I felt like something was going on with me internally that kind of contributed to me not being into fashion anymore,” she said.

Little did she know she would get back into fashion her senior year of high school. Banks said she picked it back up when they introduced fashion classes in school.

“I regained my passion for it,” she said. “I met this amazing teacher, and she saw my drawing skills and my ideas, and she genuinely wanted to help me get better because she knew I could be great.”

She started learning the basic of sewing under her teacher at the time and found her love of designing, which made her decide she wanted to continue learning through college.

“Originally I wasn’t planning on going to college,” she said. “I decided I wanted to go to school for fashion and business, which brought me here (CMU).”

Her interest in fashion sparked after taking ‘Fundamental Fashion,’ a class at CMU she thoroughly enjoyed, which is how fashion design became her central focus.

After taking that class, she declared her major at the end of her freshman year as fashion design.

With her passion for fashion, Banks had some roadblocks in her design journey, with not being diagnosed with ADHD or autism until the end of her freshman year.

“Now I’m just trying to figure out what works for me, and I’ve been making a lot of progress since I first came here,” she said.

When Banks is under a lot of pressure, she feels overwhelmed. She said sometimes she feels like she can’t do it. With sewing, it takes that pressure off from her.

“When I’m sewing and blocking out everything, I just feel at peace,” she said. “It feels almost like a mediation for me, and I could sew without listening to music, and without talking to anyone. I could just come to the sewing lab early in the morning and just start sewing and listening to the sound of the sewing machine and just go to deep thought when I am hand stitching.”

After college, she wants to be a couture designer, which is the inspiration she has for all her designs.

“I feel like it’s best for me in terms of fashion because that’s the main thing I’m designing, which is capture garments, and also the couture techniques are very time-consuming but it’s peaceful and I actually enjoy it,” she said.

Currently, Banks is designing for the second year at Threads Fashion Show. She wanted to get the most experience with her fashion journey, with the classes not being enough.

“I thought why not keep putting myself in the experience,” she said. “I’m going to make some mistakes, a lot of mistakes sometimes, but keep learning from it and making myself better to where once I graduate, I’ll have more knowledge on what to do, what not to do, proper dressmaking processes, how to properly have everything ready for a fashion show, and I’ll have a good portfolio built.”

She said her experience for this year’s fashion show was “pretty shocking.” When she decided she wanted to do Threads this year she already had a collection in mind and the producers came up with “A Night In The Spotlight” theme, which is similar to a Caburaí theme, and is something outside she’s used to designing.

“I was trying so hard to design something and make it cohesive with the theme, but also make it something that I can do, so it was a hard time juggling through that,” she said. “I spent the whole fall semester just trying to design looks.”

Banks already established she was going to do eight looks for the show, but realized it wasn’t a good idea. Her overall experience was “hectic,” “eye-opening”, and “stressful,” but untimely a good experience.

Once she finalized her designs, she felt like the hard part was over until she got to the sewing part.

“I don’t know what happened to me this year, I just couldn’t sew anything,” she said. “I got really good at sewing and construction, but with the stress I was under, the death of my uncle, being in the hospital from being exhausted, and not taking care of myself, it taught me a lesson to remove the stress from my plate and it taught me to be a little more organized.”

With everything that had happened two weeks before judging day, she said it knocked her off her game, so much that she didn’t meet the mark at the end, which made her not do so well with her collection, getting some of her looks cut.

From this experience, she learned to not meet such a high number for someone else recognition.

She said for next year she will get the concept together and start designing, instead of reaching a number. She will start focusing on herself more and not what others might think of it because it affects the quality of her designs.

“I always felt like people look down on me, and maybe they didn’t, it was maybe me feeling insecure about myself, but I just wanted to prove that I could do something,” she said. “I thought more looks equals more praise or recognition. I could have done the eight looks if I were to take more time to do them, but instead, it was a bunch of subpar looks that would have looked nicer if more care and time had gone into them.”