Saintly Flora was born out of my need to reconcile my faith and my feminism. Growing up in the Christian faith, I always felt that there was a disproportionate amount of time spent preaching about men versus women. I also encountered many people who claimed that the Bible is inherently chauvinistic, even misogynistic. As I got older and found myself identifying with feminist values and sentiments, this began to bother me.

As I considered various concepts for my senior collection while pursuing my BFA in Fashion Design at Pratt Institute, it occurred to me that I could address this issue in my design work. I decided that I would dig into the Bible and study the stories of women inside its covers, and that I would approach the task with an open mind and let the Bible speak for itself.

What I discovered was quite amazing. Rather that diminish women, the Bible actually lifts them up in many different ways. From the beginning where Eve was the pinnacle of God’s creation to the way Jesus treated women with incredible respect and compassion, the Bible reveals women to be equal to men in importance and worthy of great honor and respect. The Bible even refers to wisdom in the feminine.

I eventually decided to choose eight women from the Bible and design each look in the collection to reflect the characteristics and stories of a particular woman. As a feminist, I firmly believe that being a homemaker and mother is just as impressive as having a successful career. With that in mind, I strove to choose a cross section of women, each representing a different path in life. The women selected were Queen Esther, Abigail, Mary and Martha of Bethany, Ruth, Priscilla, Huldah, and Deborah.

Once I settled on the theme of my collection, I needed a consistent form of symbolism to base the designs on for each woman. For this, I looked to a source of beauty and strength in nature – flowers. More specifically, the language of flowers. As I studied the women I chose, I wrote down key events in their lives, actions they took, and their character traits. Then I searched for equivalents in flower language. Using the forms and colors of these equivalent flowers and herbs, I designed a look for each woman that captures their strength and beauty in a way that honors their lives and how they thrived in challenging circumstances. I eventually dubbed my collection Saintly Flora.

As I delved deeper and deeper into the Bible, some important things became clear. For example, while there is a heavy dose of the mistreatment of, the stripping of agency from, and the oppression of women in the Bible, I realized these stories were not an endorsement of such behavior. The authors were simply recording events as they occurred, which was more of an indictment of our human nature than proof of sexism in the Bible. This can be hard to understand from the viewpoint of our time and culture, which differs radically from the settings of these stories. For the most part, women had inferior rights in the cultures where Bible events occurred. They were often seen as the property of their husbands or families/guardians. While this doesn’t excuse the mistreatment of women and the trespass of their basic human rights, it does improve our ability to draw unbiased conclusions. It allows the reader to better step back and assess the moral and overarching message of each story.

Halfway through the creation of my collection, I heard about the Beauty by God fashion competition and submitted my collection. I was eventually chosen as one of four winners, and three of us showed our collections at the French Embassy during D.C. Fashion Week’s 2019 International Couture Collections Show. This was the culmination of a two-year journey that included caring for my mother in her fight against pancreatic cancer.

I grew a great deal as a designer, feminist, and follower of Jesus Christ as I worked on my collection, and it has grown to mean so much more to me than I could have imagined. It has also been very satisfying and healthy to call certain aspects of my faith into question and do the hard work of seeking the truth. As the Bible says, we should “…test everything that is said. Hold on to what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21).

For more details on the development of each look, click on the look pages in the Saintly Flora pull down menu.