Dean Harris

Patti- my professor of Dynamics of Fashion mentioned Dean Harris at least three times during the entire semester. The famous CFDA award winner used to be a struggling fashion design student in FIDM, who was considered to be not so talented. Dean had been an intern for Patti who was a well-known women’s sportswear designer at that moment. According to Patti, Dean was not good at cutting as a fashion design student, and his portfolios were not as competitive as others. However, he was still eager to develop in New York City. After graduation, he went to New York with his not-so-brilliant portfolios. However, Dean has a charming personality, therefore he succeeded as a PR and party planner instead of being a fashion designer. In New York, he started out working for KCD in Fashion Show Production...traveling to Italy for Calvin Klein...Paris for Marc Jacobs and many , many others! Later on, he was everywhere, he showed up at a lot of fashion shows.

He was still not quite satisfied to be just a PR and party organizer, since the dream to be a designer never burned out deep in his heart. He took some night classes in FIT, and then worked at the studio very hard. Finally he achieved a huge accomplishment as a jewelry designer. From his inspiring story, we realize that if a person wanted to be successful, he has to do the thing he likes, and then keeps doing it and never give it up.

Dean Harris, as we all know, was the winner of accessory design of the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1999, just a year after he started to design jewelry. The styles of his jewelry are very natural-inspired, and the shape of it looks very organic. Some of them look like tree branches wrapped and twisted into a circle. Some of them imitate the shapes of bird’s wings. He likes to use materials from nature, like stones and woods. His jewelry had been used for fashion shows of Marc Jacobs, Doo ri, Peter Som who are the main ready-to-wear designers. His jewelry was sold in Barney’s and he also is going to have an exclusive new line in Target in this summer.
SAN FRANCISCO--May 10th on Sunday in Barney's, from left to right: Vivian (me) Dean and Tia