Chicago native Anna Fong has bested her competition to win AOL Latino’s design show “Fashionista.”
As winner of the show, sort of a mini-“Project Runway” that debuted in early June, Fong gets to design a dress for former Miss Universe Dayanara Torres to wear at L.A. Fashion Week.
“I gotta admit, I was a little overwhelmed,” Fong told RedEye.
She said she always had planned to go into fashion.
“I started drawing at [age] 5. I was always drawing. Throughout grammar school and high school, I was always the artist in the group,” she said. She spent high school summers taking fashion classes at Columbia College.
Contestants for the AOL Latino contest were chosen through an online voting system, which Fong said required the designers to “market themselves” — a feat that paid off as she crept round by round from the Top 10 to the Top 3 and then the winner.
The show taped for two days in New York in August, and contestants faced a difficult 30-minute challenge to sketch out a cocktail dress that they believed Torres would want to wear. The contestants raided the New York fabric store Mood, which has been seen on “Project Runway,” for fabrics to design their dresses.
Fong and her competitors had four hours to complete their dresses.
“The cameras were always on you, and I was like, ‘Let me get away and figure this out on my own,’ ” she said. “The show was exciting, and you wanted to be a part of the action, but we were all trying to concentrate on how we were doing.”
Now Fong is busy designing the dress that Torres will wear to Latino designer Eduardo Lucero’s fashion show during L.A. Fashion Week. She also is designing her own line, which will debut for Spring 2008. Her designs can be seen on her Web site, anna-fong.com.
