Faculty member Adam Arnold profiled in Business Journal
November 08, 2019
The Portland Business Journal publishes an in-depth profile of accomplished fashion designer and tailor Adam Arnold who for 20 years has made custom garments for a select clientele out of his Portland studio. The piece notes that the analog-loving Arnold is "last of an era, but first among equals."
Arnold is also a faculty member at PNCA where he first attended art school in the 90s. The article notes:
Arnold recently began teaching an introduction to garment making, back at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Mostly they are students whose main interest is something else, like painting or sculpture, but he loves that they all want to make clothes.
"It's like the first year of fashion design squeezed into like a semester that meets once a week. Some of them have never sewn. Yet it's always the ones that have some sewing experience that you have to be the most careful with because I was that person. They just typically have to unlearn some things that they learned. And that's harder than learning."
The profile is a great view into the talented and hard-working Arnold's practice, with its 6-day weeks and 11 hour days. He does it this way, without assistants and manufacturers, one garment at a time, because he loves every bit of the process, from the clients and designing to fittings and sewing.
It talks about his creative grandparents and his initial inspiration for wanting to be a designer as well as some bumps along the career path when he tried to a sting as a designer working for a larger company before striking out on his own.