Sunday Confessions: The Day I Stopped Designing Clothes and Started Creating Art

It's just after 9 AM on a crisp Sunday morning in Los Angeles, and I'm having one of those moments that feels like a page turning in the story of my life. You know when something shifts internally and suddenly everything looks different, even though nothing around you has actually changed?

Yesterday after my impromptu solo design session, I did something I haven't done in months—I called my mom. Not the usual "yes I'm eating vegetables" check-in call, but a real conversation where I actually told her about my professor's critique and my creative crisis.

My mom, who has exactly zero background in fashion but somehow always cuts through my drama with surgical precision, just said: "Mandy, are you designing clothes or are you creating art?"

I started to explain how they're the same thing in fashion design, but she interrupted: "No, honey. Are you making things that cover bodies, or are you expressing something that needs to come out of you?"

That question haunted me all night. This morning I woke up before my alarm and realized I've been approaching my entire degree program as if I'm training to make clothes when what I actually want is to create wearable art that says something about being alive right now.

The difference seems subtle but it changes everything. It's like I've been speaking a language that's close to my native tongue but not quite right, and suddenly I remember how to speak as myself.

Looking at the sketches from yesterday with fresh eyes, I can see they're the first pieces where I wasn't just designing garments—I was saying something through them. About vulnerability. About the masks we wear. About how we reveal and conceal ourselves.

Maybe this is what mastery actually feels like—not having all the answers, but finally asking the right questions. Not perfecting a skill, but understanding why that skill matters to you in the first place.

So here's my Sunday confession: I've spent four years learning to be a fashion designer, only to realize in the eleventh hour that what I really want to be is an artist who happens to work with fabric and the human form.

And somehow, that realization doesn't feel like starting over. It feels like finally beginning.