Mentoring magic

Growing up in Newcastle, there wasn't a lot of inspiration for an aspiring designer so Sarah Scott turned to Vogue magazine, the internet and movies to feed her interest in fashion.

"My earliest memory of watching movies when I was a child was The King and I and all that crinoline," says Scott, a fourth-year fashion and textile design student at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) who will soon show her collection at Sydney's premier student fashion show.

Scott's excitement at watching Deborah Kerr sweep through the Siamese palace with her huge skirts in the 1956 film morphed into a fascination with corsetry and a love of lingerie and lace.

She has thrown all those elements – plus a dash of biker attitude via chunky metal accessories – into the mix to create a lingerie-based daywear collection, the culmination of her four years of study at UTS.

Her vision of her collection crystallised this year in great part because of a mentor program the UTS School of Design conducts for final-year students. Sophie Nixon, a graduate of the same fashion degree who is now the senior designer with Sydney-based women's wear designer Dion Lee, was paired up with Scott.

"Sophie really understands my aesthetic and my vision," says Scott, adding that she had struggled to articulate or put on paper what her collection would look like.

"The mentor relationship was incredibly important for me because this year we weren't given a design brief … the brief is the one we create ourselves and that is scary and exciting," she says.

The women had worked together last year when Scott did an internship at Willow Ltd, where Nixon was head of design. They worked together again on the fashion show for the Australian Indigenous Design Initiative, which delivers training and mentoring programs for Indigenous designers.

Nixon is mentoring three of UTS's final-year fashion and textile students, advising them on everything from the detailing on their collections to the types of models to use for the UTS graduate fashion shows on 30 October.

"You get a lot of young people doing work experience and it is hard for them to cut through," says Nixon, who wishes she had had the benefit of a mentor relationship when she was starting out.

"Sarah was very consistent. She kept turning up and she had a really good attitude and work ethic," she says.

"But it has only been in the past six weeks that I have realised how talented Sarah is. She has a natural ability at pattern-making and sewing, which has started to emerge as she has worked on her collection."

Nixon says the mentor relationship is really important for aspiring designers. "It's a tough industry and you need to be pragmatic if you want to find a job. And you need to stick with it.

"Having a mentor means the students have someone they can call at any time about anything … it gives them someone who will support them in a myriad of ways."

UTS unveils the future names in fashion in two graduate catwalk shows on 30 October. Tickets are $30 plus booking fee from moshtix.com.au.