A Designer's Search for God's Beauty

Interview with Sequoia Sierra

Part Two from our “Ethical and Dignified Fashion” Series

Photo by Luis Quintero

Interview with Sequoia

Sequoia Sierra is an entrepreneur, designer and marketer. Her entrepreneurial work has covered many facets including: business, hair extensions, beauty, fashion, design, styling, teaching, writing, and much more. She is a marketing specialist for social media, and owns two garment design companies; The Liturgical Co. (for all custom church furnishing, vestments, religious habits, etc.) and Sequoia Sierra Designs (A custom women's sustainable fashion clothing line). She has been the recipient of numerous awards honoring volunteers and young women, and has been awarded various scholarships for the pursuit of her educational endeavors. Sequoia attended Christendom College in Virginia for a time and then went on to acting school and then school for costume design, fashion merchandising, as well as business, and graduate level spiritual formation classes.

Tell us how you first started to cultivate your personal style

I’ve been into fashion since I was a baby, practically. I know there are sketches somewhere from when I was five, with designs that I would draw. When I was two or three, my mom was giving me fabric scraps and she said I would make the most amazing outfits for my dolls, without even a sewing kit, just in the way I would wrap the fabrics on my dolls. My mom was actually the first one to teach me to sew, so by the time I was about six I was able to hand-sew a lot of outfits and things for my dolls, so it’s really been in me since the very beginning.

I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t obsessed with clothing and how it looked and what people wore and there were so many times that I remember even as a child thinking, “oh if that woman would just wear this, she would look so much better, or tuck this in or etc.” I would always, not judging in a bad way, but everyone I would see it's’ like, “oh that is a good outfit” or “hmm only if she had only done this it would be perfect.” So that’s just the running script that’s been in my brain, I don’t really know anything else.

It’s always been there but it’s definitely developed in that when I was younger and a teenager of course you tend to go with styles that are popular at the time (like the horrible parachute material from the 90s, plastic stretchy chokers and butterfly clips - not a happy time). You experiment with all of that, but then eventually you kind of find, what really looks good and once I got a little bit older and really started looking into body types and color palettes, that’s when it even changed for me. I realized, ok for my body type, this is what is going to look best.

It’s definitely been a bit of a development but I do think from my late teens until now it’s been very similar. I would say that my 19-year-old self and I would probably agree on what we like and what we wear. And that’s nice that it hasn’t been a huge drastic change for me, it’s been very organic and different styles have emerged and all of that, so I’ll incorporate things that I like, but overall it's very classic.

I’m a designer and I think we all tend to have our own personal uniform. I do wear a lot of black. It’s more of the silhouettes that are very feminine and flattering to my body type and that’s what makes it more feminine opposed to having to wear a bunch of bright colored florals because that’s not going to be my thing, that’s not in my color palate so I’m not going to wear that.

Describe the relationship between your faith and love for fashion. How do the two inform one another?

For me, a big thing for design is beauty, and I think authentic beauty always points back to God. It’s a beauty based on human dignity, not the beauty that people use to describe things that might not necessarily be beautiful.

A big thing I take into consideration is, what can I do to make women look and feel more beautiful without having to kind of curate that on their own. I feel like for a lot of women, they don’t know what is beautiful, or makes them look beautiful and what enhances their beauty, so it’s a task to teach them that, whereas with this design it's like, “ok this will make any woman where she will be elevated automatically,” that way it can make them feel their best and let their own beauty shine forth.

When it comes to the modesty camp, I think that we have a really big divide, even in the Catholic world. We have [a “cover your whole body” mentality] or we have the other extreme of, “wear whatever you want because God created your body so flaunt it if you’ve got it,” and those are both two extremes, but that’s all women really have. It’s hard for women to find the middle ground.

What I’ve come to find, especially in dealing with a variety of body types and a variety of women is that it really comes down to why the Church has given us reason. Modesty isn’t just a skirt length or a neckline objectively. We can’t just say, “if you don’t meet this many measurements past your knee, you’re immodest.” No, it depends on the person and the situation.

I’ve taught etiquette as well and that is a big part of it - how they carry themselves as a woman will really change what they are wearing, it will elevate it or not elevate it.  I tell them, ask yourself three questions every day:

1. Where will I be going? (Are you going to Church or to the beach? That will make a difference)

2. What will I be feeling? (Are you going to pray or are you going to go clean up outside?) 

3. Who will I be with/who will be there?

So, say you’re going to a restaurant on a date vs. going to dinner with your parish priest. For the date, you’re not going to wear anything inappropriate, but you’re going to try to be more attractive. Whereas if you’re going to that same restaurant with your parish priest you’re going to tone it down a bit. You’re not going to wear that red dress. Your purpose there is very different and the way your dress should reflect that.

You have to really know your body type and know appropriateness so you can have that in mind when you get dressed. And it becomes automatic the more we do it. God gave us reason for a purpose and we should be able to think, “this is what I’m doing and this is what is appropriate.”

There are certain things that, yeah you probably shouldn’t wear in public, but there are very few outfits that are completely verboten in a public setting. For most of them it just depends on which public setting you’re going to.

How do you see fashion related to the dignity of the person? How do you choose to incorporate this into your designs and stylings of others?

Because [Sequoia Sierra Designs is] a women’s collection, the designs that I choose are ones that will look good on a variety of body types. So they’re definitely a little bit more broad in the design versus if I was commissioned, it would be for that specific person’s body and shape. So I go with what is going to look good and enhance most body types. It should enhance their femininity, not in a revealing way, but it will be feminine in its design or color or pattern. Part of that is the way we construct garments. I design garments where they don’t have to worry that this top is a crop top and if I bend over you’ll see everything. Things that they will feel comfortable in but also get to the point where they feel fancier. ...

In terms of what I look for when I’m styling someone, when I initially talk to a client, I get a photo of them so that I can see their skin tone, so I’ll know what their color palate will be, which ones will go best on them etc. I’ll see their body type so I’ll know that, but mainly just talking to them: asking them what part of their body they dislike and want to hide, because that also tells me a lot about them, what they’re thinking and what they think of themselves. That gives me a whole insight into them and when they explain those things you’ll know automatically with a woman if she’s confident or if she wants to hide everything.

When I go and pick out clothing for them and they come to try it on, I will throw things in there that I know they would never pick themselves but would look great on them. I tell them, “look, try this on, I know this is something you wouldn’t choose but I just want you to see.” And a lot of times there’s this epiphany where they just didn’t know how to put certain colors or things together, or they didn’t realize that with their body shape they shouldn’t wear this or they should wear that, but it's so rewarding to see these little fireworks in their brains going off like “oh my gosh how did I not see this or know this before.” It's immensely rewarding too, when they get it. They learn how to put things together. Sometimes later they’ll text me, “this is the outfit I put together with these principles, what do you think?” Most of them get there, so that is a big comfort.

It can really change their life and it’s amazing to see. You can see that their confidence goes up. Even if they were confident before it goes up, but especially those ones that didn’t have much confidence to begin with. Once they know that they can put an outfit together and look good it's amazing how that changes their world and trickles down into everything else in their life. It’s like “wow if I can have control over this then I can do other things.” How we look and feel affects everything for us, so it’s pretty foundational. 

Looking back, have you seen any parallel between spiritual growth or trials in your life and your personal style?

Yes in a way. Starting off in costume design and the film industry and television, it was fun, but there was a point where the environment on set was so secular and people would be high and would talk about all sorts of horrible things …. While [it was] good to be a light to those people, at the same time [it was] also really hard to be around that a lot. For me ... it was very draining when I would leave set: I would feel depleted body, mind, heart and soul because I wasn’t just trying hard to do my work, but I was dealing with navigating and trying not to condone what some of these people were doing, but also not being this, “oh, she tells us we’re bad” [kind of person]. It was a very hard balance and for me it was like, I don’t want to do this forever. This is not sustainable for my life. And I was growing spiritually at the time because that was when I became a lay order Norbertine and was trying to incorporate Norbertine spirituality more into my daily life. So I realized, ok if I take an honest look at this and I ask myself honestly, “do I really want to do this forever?” it was like no, but I do love design so then what?

Since I had done costume design and designs for real people in a variety of body types, it helped [me realize] that I was able to design for the average person a lot better than even a lot of fashion companies do because they design for the model, but she’s not the reality …. So that’s when I started thinking, ok I’m going to try private design and just throw it out there and see how it goes. And that really is something that started to work and develop. For me it was never like I wanted to be a celebrity stylist. My family business is in the hair extension industry so I grew up [around a lot of celebrities], I walked my first red carpet when I was twelve, etc. I’ve been up close and personal to [celebrities] and they’re just like us, or sometimes they’re worse off because they’re struggling with a lot of stuff … so for me that was never such a big draw. I [knew] what that [was] and [that] it is not the end-all sort of a thing that people try to put it up as. So for me … I didn’t need to be in with the celebrities to feel accomplished, for me, just helping a woman feel confident in herself and to define her own style, that was what most rewarding, whether she was a celebrity or not.

So [all of this] goes hand in hand with me growing spiritually within our lay order and really realizing, “ok what is really important in life at the end of the day and what do I really want to be a part of, what is the environment I want to immerse myself in?” … So it was kind of like, “alright, any example I can be [on a film set] will kind of fall on deaf ears and it will eventually really affect me more than me affect them, because it's literally me against the world at that point.” So that’s when I decided “ok my work here is done and I’ve tried, but this is not a sustainable form of reaching out to people, I can do it in a better way.” And that kind of trickled out into everything else I did. I participated in a pageant and that was my platform about human dignity, so I think there was definitely a thread of what I was focusing on and what was being tugged in my heart to focus on and it all revolved around that basically and it’s all just grown from there.

How does your faith inform your commitment to ethical fashion?

There’s a lot of great documentaries out there that highlight what is going on in the fashion industry from the waste and the environmental impact that it has. But more importantly, is the fact that how many people it affects negatively

There is a balance between the fact that yes, in third-world countries some of these people would have no work whatsoever, and I get that their salaries and pay will be less than what it is here because they can survive, they can pay rent and have food on like $75 a month, while you cannot sustain that here. And that’s why a lot of companies go out there ... But there’s also a lot of people who take advantage of that, [people] who do not pay them a just wage, a living wage, for their particular country. ….They should [be paying] them something where [workers] can actually put food on the table without stressing out about paying their rent and all of that and not live in some squalor and poverty still because a lot of these people, they’re living in horrible, horrible living conditions. They have no proper breaks and no set amount of hours. These are people who work 16+ hour days sometimes in a factory and that is completely inhumane.

So for us, part of it is a moral thing, where we want to provide high quality things but that are made ethically. We pay someone in the US a good, living wage to make this - it wasn’t labor where they’re in a sweatshop for 16+ hours a day in horrible conditions like what happened in Bangladesh where there was a fire and everybody died because they were packed in there, that is awful.

It’s a fine balance. We have some accessories right now that we provide that are imported, but we will probably eventually phase that out. Whereas all of our clothes though are made here in the USA, and actually some of our accessories too. Only our headbands that are very complimentary to our clothing are imported, everything else is made here right now and we want to keep it that way.

The hard thing too is informing the public, so it goes kind of slowly because we have those times when people question why it’s so expensive and they’re used to buying a shirt at H&M for $25 but there’s no way that a company turn a profit on that if they are paying that person a living wage, because it wouldn’t cost that low, they’re paying this person pennies! Whereas for us, we have the cost of the garment, which is directly going to the seamstress, so they don’t realize that and then I have to take into consideration the fabric, the cost of the textiles and the marketing and all of that. They’re the ones sewing and I want to be sure this is done fairly for them and for me.

I am about doing what is fair and just because I really think that that comes back to you, too. So it’s like “let's do this the right way the first time because it’s the right thing to do and it’s the just and moral things to do.”

This interview was compiled and edited by Amelia Arth.

Read Part Three from “Ethical and Dignified Fashion”