COLUMBUS, Ohio — Columbus is known for being the third-largest hub of fashion in the country and the community's biggest event of the year is just around the corner. Fashion Week Columbus will feature the work of some of the best designers our city has to offer.
Sydney Peters is a young designer who will make her debut in this year’s prestigious High Fashion Tea Runway Show.
“I’ve always wanted to do fashion,” said Peters. “I’ve known this since I was a little girl.”
A major influence on her creativity and love of fashion was Peters’ mother.
“I always remember looking back at old pictures [and] my mom would put me in, like, the cutest, craziest outfits,” Peters recalled. “So style has always been a huge part of my life and my mom had, like, this ginormous closet with a wall stacked full of shoes. So, for me growing up, I always saw just a woman who has amazing taste, amazing style and she was so bold.”
Along with a keen fashion sense, Peters’ mom imparted a love of nature.
“When I was growing up, my mom and I would plant these fairy gardens in the backyard,” Peters said. “I would always sketch and draw these little fairy people with different outfits.”
Peters, who studied biology in school, likes to also include her love of natural textures and fibers in her designs, many of which she has collected through her adventures.
“My more recent collection is really inspired by nature and flowers and gardens, but a lot of what I do too is really heavily inspired by travel,” said Peters. “I love taking pictures of just, like, textures – sand on the beach, architecture. I love to travel and explore different cultures as well because that’s where I draw a lot of my inspiration from.”
This love of the natural world has helped to inspire the path ahead for Peters and her designs. She explained that she has always wanted to explore the areas where her career in fashion design can intersect with her scientific background in biology.
On a recent trip to the Dominican Republic, Peters was inspired by the fibrous bark of a palm tree to come up with a way to make a biodegradable dress from the fascinating material.
“It would have a shorter lifecycle and you could wear it [while] it’s trendy for, like, a season, and then it goes back to the Earth,” explained Peters. “Just being a science nerd, trying to make my own textiles that can give clothes a shorter lifecycle because, more recently...I was making clothes that have a really long lifecycle because I wanted to create something that can be in someone’s closet for twenty-plus years and never goes out of style.”
While she did have designs featured in last year’s Passport to Fashion show, Fashion Week Columbus 2023 will mark Peters’ debut at the High Fashion Tea Runway Show. That event will be held at Le Méridien Columbus, The Joseph in the Short North.
Bringing her innovative designs to that location will be an extra meaningful moment for Peters who, not too long ago, was working the High Tea show as a bartender for the hotel.
“I just remember telling everyone that I was working with at The Joseph ‘I’m going to be in that show one day – mark my words!’” said Peters. “I wasn’t a designer then but, in two short years, here I am actually in the show. So, for me, it’s like a full-circle moment of, not only being fully in Fashion Week this year with one of the main shows, but also just following through on my own promises to myself.”
Fashion Week Columbus runs from Sept. 24-30. For information on all of the events, check out their website here.