Despite a brief television stint, Penn alumna Kristin Haskins Simms has not forgotten her roots here at Penn.
Tuesday night, Simms returned to campus to discuss her career in fashion and her experience as a contestant on the eighth season of Project Runway during “Designing a Career: Putting Creativity to Work,” an event hosted by the Penn Alumni Multicultural Outreach.
Simms graduated in 1993 with a degree in English and a minor in French. After graduating, she began working as a pensions and annuities consultant at the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and College Retirement Equities Fund in New York City. She said her job in finance, however, left her unfulfilled, so she applied to a three-year program at the Rhode Island School of Design.
“I started becoming interested in art and graphic design in order to find what I needed creatively,” Simms said.
Her crossover into fashion occurred after the success of a T-shirt she created, which featured a design of Martin Luther King. “I used history as an inspiration. I always believed that fashion can be a way to educate.” With a few leftover shirts, Simms created a T-shirt jacket, which led to the launch of her own fashion line — strangefruit.
Due to the success of strangefruit, Simms was able to show her work at Philadelphia Fashion Week. “There are so many resources and opportunities for upcoming fashion designers to showcase their work in Philadelphia,” she said.
After she showed at Fashion Week, Simms’ friends and family urged her to audition for Project Runway. A few months later, Simms received a call from producers telling her she was a semifinalist for the show.
“I didn’t know if I would even make it onto the show, but I was very happy to see Tim Gunn and get a critique from him,” she said when describing the experience. “When I did get the call that I had gotten on the show, I walked around New York in a complete daze.”
Initially, the “unnatural work environment” of the show challenged Simms because she needed her own mental and creative space when designing. However, she “took little steps and was realistic.”
Many students and alumni said they came to learn the behind-the-scenes work of Project Runway. “You never really get to know what happens behind the scenes. Producers edit so much of the show,” College sophomore Alexis Lukach said.
Simms, who lives and works in Philadelphia, is now hoping to get her line into local boutiques and to start an accessory line. “For me, design is about creative problem solving,” she said. “Fashion is just a three-dimensional method of problem solving.”
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