My name is Avalon Hester. I am a designer and journalist fascinated by the ways that our wardrobe can be a part of our activism and motivated to design clothes that provide solutions to the problems we face.
Art as Fashion as Journalism as Activism.
Graduating from the New School with a BFA in Fashion Design and a BA in Journalism, my focus is on merging journalistic research with artistic presentation to create designs that evoke empathy and explore new possibilities in storytelling. This began in 2018 when I created a dress from hand-painted portraits of overlooked women throughout history, which received recognition in the New York Times.
Reporting
I believe that the core of reporting is using your abilities to help project the stories of others. This is the part of my work that I am most passionate about. Meeting new people and being trusted to tell their stories is at the heart of my work.
Fashion Design
Fashion Design enables me to create art that interacts with the body and speaks to the identity of the wearer.
Fine Art
My first love is portraiture. I love the bond that happens between the subject and the artist. I created a portraiture project at the main Amazon campus in Seattle that ran from 2016-2017, and I have created performance art portraits for notable events such as Lin Manuel Miranda’s Last Night at Hamilton.
