I've always been the stylist for my female friends, all the way back to junior high school. Women listened to my opinions and ideas on their style, and found that I had a knack for helping them find "their" style. Around High School prom time, it was hilarious. I'd sit in girls' bedrooms and help them figure out what to wear! I saw more naked girls in two weeks than most men see in their entire lives. :-) The funny thing is that I was sexually active and completely hetero, and they knew that, but I was able to kinda switch off that part of me, and just be fully into the "personal stylist" mode, helping them feel fabulous about their style/look.... before they headed out to the prom with their boyfriends! That continued throughout my life. I'd suggest someone try on a specific garment, they'd look at it skeptically, raise their eyebrow at me, and grudgingly try it on... and suddenly it would become their favorite item! The base they built their entire new wardrobe upon! So yeah... when I moved back to the US from living overseas, I couldn't get a job because I'd never gone to college. I needed a checkbox in the "College Degree?" box on my job application forms. Late one night I saw an ad on TV for the Seattle Art Institute's "Fashion Design Program". I thought, "Shit. I'm good with styling women... I wonder if I can make women's clothes?" The program was something like 2 years to an A.A. degree, which I could compress down to 18 months if I worked hard, so I signed up... ... and was a 38 year old straight white dude in a classroom full of 20-something girls and two gay guys. It was weird. But, I kicked ass at it. Learned all the stuff really fast. Taught and tutored my other students. Fixed broken sewing machines. Re-threaded sergers. Designed a couple of lines of clothing, made them, did fashion shows with them. It was fun. But the fashion industry is incredibly shitty in many different ways (environmentally, socially, and it just is an engine for destroying young women), so I washed my hands of that business and got out of it. So yeah. That's my fashion design history in a nutshell. (With one enormous omission: Utilikilts.) I had no idea that's what you studied, what interests/interested you about it?