{"id":9619,"date":"2017-08-16T12:10:02","date_gmt":"2017-08-16T16:10:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/textiles.ncsu.edu\/news\/?p=9619"},"modified":"2024-05-06T10:04:02","modified_gmt":"2024-05-06T14:04:02","slug":"from-fashion-to-function","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/textiles.ncsu.edu\/news\/2017\/08\/from-fashion-to-function\/","title":{"rendered":"From Fashion to Function"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n
Kelly Bogan describes her younger self as a maker. The Wilson College of Textiles<\/a> alumna spent her childhood crafting, painting and sewing tiny clothes for her dolls and stuffed animals. Now, she researches and prototypes textile material on the leading edge as a textile design engineer in the applied sciences group at software giant Microsoft<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe’re product driven, meaning that our research is supposed to inspire future products and also innovate and inspire the industrial design team to make unique products,\u201d she said. \u201cOne of my group metrics is generating intellectual property, so as long as the ideas that we generate might inspire product…that is fair game for us to explore.\u201d She works on between three and five projects at a time, innovating new textiles for products like the nonwoven fabric-covered keyboard blade of the Surface tablet and other, more exploratory research.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIs there a best yarn that could be used?\u201d she said. \u201cIs it something that could have unique sensing capabilities and that fits into the eTextiles space? Is it something that improves the washfast, the oleophobic, hydrophobic, finish that\u2019s on the textile? Are there certain weave structures — if we go to wovens — that could help protect against certain kind of abrasions? So it goes from very technical to something that could be very creative.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bogan is celebrating her first anniversary as a textile design engineer at Microsoft, a position for which she is uniquely qualified. Before graduating from the Wilson College of Textiles with a Master of Science in Textiles<\/a> in 2016, she worked as a fabric manager and buyer for high-end fashion brand Honor<\/a>. In that capacity, she researched and sourced fabric for seasonal collections and developed and maintained relationships with fabric vendors and textile mills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn a nutshell, it’s just managing projects and being able to work across disciplines, because you do that in apparel,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen I was in New York, I would have to work with designers, production, development groups — all very different minded, goal-oriented people with different timelines and different objectives…so I had to juggle all of these things and I think it prepared me to do this kind of work. Being able to know the right questions to ask, who to ask for help, what information to share with whom, how to grow the group and grow projects.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She graduated summa cum laude from Syracuse University in 2010 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in fashion and apparel design. While in school, she interned in the soft wovens department at apparel company Anthropologie<\/a> and was a costume and textiles intern at the Philadelphia Museum of Art<\/a>. She was a sales associate and design consultant at fabric store Mood<\/a>\u00a0(of Project Runway<\/a> fame), a textile dyer at Dyenamix<\/a>, and taught fabric making, dyeing, embroidery, pattern making and sewing at art and design center 3rd Ward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bogan loved working in the apparel industry, but she always knew she wanted to return to school to earn her master\u2019s degree. She took the GRE right after moving to New York, attended an open house at NC State<\/a> that spring, and applied to the Wilson College of Textiles. Unfortunately, she was missing some core classes and was not accepted; in an email, alumni distinguished graduate professor Dr. Abdel-Fattah Mohamed Seyam<\/a> advised her to take the courses and then reapply to the program. She was working 40 hours a week and did not think she had the time, so she postponed her dream of a graduate degree…until she realized her GRE scores were about to expire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI still wanted to go to school and (NC State) was the only school I wanted to go to, and I feel like I had also outgrown my position at Honor,\u201d she said. \u201cI was doing well, but season after season after season, it was the same stuff. The designs were changing, but I was still young and ready to try again.\u201d In 2014, she was provisionally accepted to the Wilson College of Textiles while she made up the gap in her education by taking a statistics class at the nearby Fashion Institute of Technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n