Staff Photo Nick Brothers
Dallas Musick, of Alberti&Co., stands next to her “A” cardigan and one of her “flirty Alberti” skirts.
Dallas Musick has been creating her own fashion designs for all of six months.
Born and raised in Bentonville, Musick will be repping her hometown. After graduating college, Musick got hired at Walmart to work as a senior recruiter.
While it’s not even a year old yet, her company name, Alberti&Co. gets its name from her family lineage’s original Italian-descent name. So, the phrase “Be original. Be Alberti” stuck.
All of her designs and looks that will be at Northwest Arkansas Fashion Week are custom made for her friends who are modeling them and inspired by their personalities and how they carry themselves. More importantly, Musick wanted to create a fashion line that worked for and complemented women of all shapes, heights and sizes.
The Alberti&Co. fashion line will be the first to go for the evening at 7 p.m. during the Saturday, March 4 fashion show at Record. She’ll also be on the panel at The Gala to speak about Fashion Week March 2.
We got the chance to talk with her about her vision and her inspiration she brings to her designs:
TFW: So how did you first start out with fashion design?
MUSICK: I started trying things out in high school and a few things in college. This past July, at a First Thursday here on the square I was trying to sell sweaters I had worked on and I sold half of what I had. So that kind of gave me confidence to give it a shot. I started with cardigans that started with Arkansas state patches on the elbow, rather than the typical ovals. People really like those, and they still sell really well. I’ve moved on and switched to one of the pieces that’s going to be in the show that’s a modern day letterman jacket that’s like a soft cashmere cardigan with modern typography and it has a red suede A and a leather razorback attached. I can’t sell it before it’s approved and licensed, but I can have it on the runway.
Photo courtesy of Delanna K. Photography
Modelled by and designed specifically for one of Dallas Musick’s friends, the “Milky Way” dress will be one of the looks she’s bringing to her Northwest Arkansas Fashion Week debut.
But yeah, it was just in August when I started creating looks and selling them. In high school I saw a friend who had gotten involved with Northwest Arkansas Fashion week and I thought it looked so cool. I was always a little intimidated by it because it seemed so professional. I reached out to Robin, the creative director, and told her my vision and she loved it. We talked more about that and it went from there.
TFW: What’s your vision or theme for your looks you’re bringing to Fashion Week?
MUSICK: When I look at a runway, I want to see things that I could potentially wear that could fit my body, not what I feel like I would have to change myself to be in order to feel feminine. A lot of times curvy type clothes aren’t made to fit people who have shapes or curves. I want to accentuate that and I want people to feel empowered when they wear my clothing. I found models, I have different age groups, ethnicity and size and height, from a size zero to a size 16. I wanted women that represented today.
Each girl that I have I picked. They’re either acquaintances or friends that I’ve gotten to know and I really tried to understand their personalities, the things they enjoy and the activities they are involved in and then I tried to express it through clothing. There’s one girl who goes salsa dancing every night, so I made her a dress that looks like a tulip that twirls around. I have a girl who’s not afraid to dream big, and for some reason I thought it would be cool to do a Milky Way. I have a leather skirt and a black top that opens up in the back where I’ve painted and beaded a Milky Way scene. I embroidered it, sewed it and painted it by hand.
I have a metallic rain coat for one person, too. It’s hard to explain until you meet the people and you see how it molds the clothes. They make the clothes complete, not the other way around.
TFW: What are you looking forward to about your first fashion show?
MUSICK: It’s definitely a dream come true. When I first saw it when I was in high school, I thought man, how can I get into this? Meeting Robin has helped open so many doors for me and helped me reach… I don’t know. You know how when you talk to some people and they tell you “I wish I would have done this and I wish I had gone after what I had dreamed of”. I feel like meeting Robin has helped me reach those dreams. This event has challenged me as a designer, but in a way that has improved myself as a business and as a professional. If anybody that can get involved with this, I think they should. It’s something they could never ask for in a lifetime. It’s awesome.
Photo courtesy of Delanna K. Photography
This long, red velvet dress from Alberti&Co. is among the looks to be featured at the Northwest Arkansas Fashion Week runway Saturday.
Right now, my whole mind is just focused on “complete the show, complete the show.” I think after it would be really awesome to get some pieces into some boutiques and some stores and try and get involved with the community or with other people who really do want specific designs for themselves. I hope I can reach out to that audience that has been looking for something to make them feel more confident and I can provide that to them. I mean, being on the cover of Vogue is always the dream. We’ll get there some day.
TFW: Where do you draw your inspiration from for your styles?
MUSICK: Probably nature. I think nature has a lot of beauty in itself. I like to look closely at the patterns of flowers or trees and the way they’re structured. Architecture I think is beautiful. I love history and taking pieces of history and making it into something we can use now. I took a history of apparel course and the main thing I took from it is there’s five or six different eras that we keep going back to. The same cuts and the same styles we keep recreating. Nothing is completely original anymore, we’re just creating different variations of the five or six. One of my favorite eras is the 20s, the Gatsby era. That was actually ancient Egypt that inspired the 20s. That to me is what’s interesting. One of the cardigans I made is weaved, and in the stone age they were weaving baskets and I wanted to bring that kind of pattern idea to it.
