I Just Wanted To Be A Fashion Designer

I was almost shot, unknowingly sent to a strip club for dinner, received a large cash payment in a brown paper bag, taken to drug rehab, made acquaintances with an accused murderer, witnessed a one legged woman dance, chased by the paparazzi, accused of check fraud, in search of a female pimp, and interviewed by the news because I was considered the best loser of them all, but when it was all said and done I JUST WANTED TO BE A FASHION DESIGNER.

I attended design school in Atlanta where I took an internship at one of the city’s premiere record labels. That internship would not only begin my career as a celebrity wardrobe stylist but would also be the beginning of my journey down a road of fashion misfortune and rejection that had I been forewarned I would have sworn the seer was under narcotic influence.

Working with celebrities from music, film, television, and sports may have appeared glamorous on the outside but the emotional toll of constant alienation, and an underlying bombardment of disapproval with my looks was making me homicidal. (Can you be too ugly to work behind the camera?) Inevitably the time came when I had to ask myself if pursuit of fashion was worth my sanity. And if I didn’t do fashion, the thing I had loved my whole life, what else would I do?

I JUST WANTED TO BE A FASHION DESIGNER is a humorous memoir about pursuit of a dream, coping with rejection and failure, and deciding what’s most important in life. Names have been changed to disguise the guilty, but mainly to protect me from litigation. Called “the Everybody Hates Chris of fashion” by one blog reader I JUST WANTED TO BE A FASHION DESIGNER is a humorous read that ends in hope.