Ex-skater has designs on Europe

Willie Traeger’s journey to the fashion world began on the ice.

She was about 11 years old and just beginning her career as a competitive figure skater. She needed something to wear during a routine and, having long been fascinated by skating costumes, decided to design her own.

Traeger was going to skate to Irish music and would be incorporating Irish dance into her routine, so the outfit’s color was obvious. It was green with a minty green bodice and skirt, darker green velvet on top, three-quarter-length sleeves and beads — lots of beads.

“I was very big into beading and sparkle,” Traeger said.

Now, 15 years later, the Kalispell native has left competitive skating behind and is pursuing a career in fashion design. She graduated last spring from Parsons, a design school in New York City, and she leaves next week for a six-month internship with a designer in London.

“I’m really excited to gain European experience,” Traeger said Tuesday in a phone interview from New York.

Traeger, who began figure skating when she was 9, retained her love of ice and design while growing up in the Flathead Valley. She trained in Whitefish and at rinks in Canada and Spokane, and whenever she needed a competition costume, she designed her own.

Traeger longed to explore the world outside Montana. After graduating from Flathead High School, she decided to pursue her love of fashion design at Colorado State University.

She was only there two years before a new opportunity arrived. Traeger moved to Texas to team up with a Russian skater, Konstantin Emshanov, to compete in pairs skating.

“I decided to put school on hold and take what at the time I thought was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for pairs skating,” she said.

Even though training kept her busy, Traeger found time for her other passion. She started her own business designing custom figure-skating competition wear.

But after a little more than two years, Traeger needed to get out of the skating partnership and move on with her life. She still loved fashion and enrolled in Parsons, a well-known, well-respected design school.

When she arrived, she discovered she had to start from scratch.

“When I got in [to Parsons], they wouldn’t accept any of my transfer credits for the fashion credits I’d already taken,” she said.

Undaunted, she stuck with the four-year program and in May graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in fashion design.

Her entire senior year was spent creating her thesis collection. Students are required to design five to seven full looks and have to present their designs before a panel of industry experts.

If she was going to work on the project for a whole year, Traeger knew she wanted her collection to mean something. For inspiration, she looked to her family history.

Her great-grandfather, Charles Overfield, had kept detailed journals of his travels across the country in the early 1900s. Traeger used him and the time period in which he lived as inspiration.

“I was thinking about what I wanted to wear during that time and things [when I was] growing up, details that I’ve always wanted to incorporate in my clothing, like long trains and lace,” she said.

She also turned to her mother, Dallas Traeger, a jewelry designer and maker, for help. Traeger designed a cameo of her great-grandmother’s profile and had her mother create cameo-based jewelry to accompany her clothing designs.

“I wanted to keep my family, generational heritage and bring it to a more modern approach in fashion,” Traeger said.

Her thesis collection got a boost after Traeger was named a finalist in the 2010 Solstiss Bucol Competition. Solstiss and Bucol, high-end lace and silk manufacturers, respectively, supply many of fashion’s top designers, Traeger said.

To win the competition, Traeger had to demonstrate how she would incorporate those fabrics in her collection. When she was named a finalist, Traeger was allowed to choose certain laces and silk fabrics from Solstiss and Bucol’s New York showroom and use them in her collection.

As the winner, Traeger won a trip to France to visit lace and silk factories and meet with designers. The trip was only supposed to last a week, Traeger said, but she ended up extending it so she could visit designers and companies in Germany, Italy and England to try to get an internship.

“I feel like the designers here in New York are very mass consumption-based, not really about design or about respecting the materials and respecting the art of design,” Traeger said of why she pursued work in Europe. “It’s very cheap fashion, and I don’t agree with that philosophy of design.”

The London design company Erdem, where her internship begins Aug. 16, is closer to Traeger’s philosophy. She expects to do everything from embellishing fabrics for the designer to helping dress models during next month’s London Fashion Week.

Eventually, she hopes to make her way back to France.

“I love London, but I would like to make my way to Paris. That’s my goal,” she said.

In Paris, she hopes to one day have her own label that will allow her to work one-on-one with clients to design specific pieces for specific needs.

“I want to make each piece unique and work with the customer on a couture basis, making a design just for them,” she said. “My goal, my feeling of fashion is make the woman feel beautiful.”

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.