Seventeen Magazine has announced the winner of their Pretty Amazing contest, and the winner is one of Northwestern’s very own.
Sophomore Zoë Damacela has a pretty amazing story to go with her new title. After enduring homelessness and poverty for more than 10 years, she started her own fashion business as a freshman in high school. She has met Miranda Cosgrove, Tyra Banks and President Obama. Now, Zoë is the first reader to be on Seventeen’s cover.
Year: 2014
Major: History major, costume design minor
Birthday: March 11
Hometown: LA, Santa Barbara and Chicago—I consider all three of those my hometowns.
How did you find out you won the Pretty Amazing contest?
They surprised me at work. I was … working at American Eagle [this summer], so I was in New York in the design office and they showed up at my job and Ann Shoket, the editor, was there and MTV people and all the Seventeen people were there and there were pictures of me everywhere. It was kind of weird, but it was really cool.
How did you get into fashion design?
I’ve been designing since I was a kid, like four or something, but I started the business when I was 14, and I just started by selling to people I knew. I kind of built a name for myself in Chicago first. I guess it spread a lot through word of mouth. And then I’ve had a lot going on in Chicago—I started doing a lot of news and media and stuff, and then I got to be more nationally known, and then more internationally known, as well.
What kind of design do you do?
My target market’s 18-24, so it’s pretty young, it’s very feminine. I think it’s like fun stuff. I do a lot of special occasion and formal wear rather than day dresses and everything like that, so a lot of it’s pretty formal.
Your Seventeen cover says you overcame homelessness. Can you tell us about it?
My mom came to the United States from Ecuador and she was pretty young, and we just didn’t have anywhere to live. We were living with relatives for a while and then we moved to Santa Barbara in California so my mom could go to school there at UCSB. But while we were there we didn’t know anybody there, we didn’t have enough money to get a place and so we ended up homeless for a while. We lived in shelters and then from there we lived in a group home for single mothers and their children. Single mothers could live there for like 100 bucks a month with all their kids. After that, we went in and out of shaky situations and then we finally got an apartment and a place to live when I was 15 or something. So it was maybe 10 or 12 years of in and out.
How did you end up here at Northwestern?
I had always planned on going to design school, so I was touring Parsons and FIT and I just didn’t like them. I went to New York and I was looking at the schools and I just didn’t feel like particularly excited to go. I didn’t feel enthusiastic about the programs that they offered and I started to rethink my options. I decided to go with a more liberal arts kind of school, so I ended up touring Northwestern because I went to high school in Chicago. I loved the school, it was awesome when I first came on campus and I loved the fact that I could study something besides fashion. I’m a history major and my minor is costume design and I’m considering another minor in Italian.
What do you have to balance while you’re here?
I’m really busy all the time. I have to do a lot of traveling because, in addition to running my business, I have to come up with the designs and I have to sew the garments together and I have to manage my employees and manage my finances, so that takes a lot. Then I also do modeling, so I have to travel a lot for modeling as well and then I’m also a spokesperson for a couple of different things. I spoke at the White House, I spoke at the Clinton Global Intiative, I speak at conferences and education conferences and business conferences. I also do things to help kids in difficult circumstances like myself, so I speak at public schools, I speak to motivate kids to go to college, so I have to travel to schools and I also beauty campaign things, I do some stuff for Neutrogena. But I’ve been balancing all this stuff since I was a freshman in high school, so you kind of get used to being busy.
Where do you think you’ll be in five years?
I’ll be continuing to run my business. It’s hard to imagine because five years ago I was just starting out and I was sewing stuff in my bedroom on my $20 sewing machine from Walgreens and I wasn’t anything, I was just a regular person. Just to think how far I’ve come in the past five years, it’s crazy. I can’t even imagine what I’ll be doing five years from now.
What do you like most about NU?
I love the fact that at Northwestern I can study a bunch of different things. That was my biggest complaint with design schools… that I took fashion all through high school, so I knew how to design, I knew how to sew and that was the only thing that they could offer me at design school. But at Northwestern you have so many different options— there’s classes on pretty much everything, there’s clubs for everything, there’s organizations for everything. I love the fact that there’s so much diversity. I think that’s something that we really take for granted being here. At a lot of other schools, everybody’s the same and everybody’s going toward the same thing and it’s awesome to be in a place where you can meet people who have different experiences than you.
What is your guilty pleasure?
I feel like there’s a lot of weird stuff I do but I don’t really consider it a guilty pleasure because I’m very upfront about it. Food is definitely Easy Mac. I eat like three Easy Macs a day all the time. Easy Mac totally saves my life. Especially when you’re busy running around, you just take it with you and you don’t have to worry about anything, and it’s awesome.
Why Her Campus loves Zoë…
Zoë is the quintessential Northwestern woman; busy, bright and beautiful. We love that she loves our school and that she is taking the world by storm. Congrats, Zoë!