Yuki Xu from RISD wins Supima Design Competition 2021

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Sep 13, 2021

Yuki Xu from the Rhode Island School of Design has won this year’s design award of Supima, the cashmere of cotton, in an award ceremony compered by Law Roach.

Xu impressed with her biomorphic mode ideas in a competition that annually pits students from fashion colleges throughout the United States. The winner takes home a prize of $10,000 as well as industry recognition and visibility.

The noted stylist and image architect Roach announced this year’s Supima Design Competition winner after a joint show in mid-town Manhattan during New York Fashion Week.

Supima is a non-profit organization that promotes the use of American-grown Pima cotton around the world, and has hosted the event for the past decade. Xu and five other finalists from top design schools across the country showcased eveningwear capsule collections created entirely with Supima cotton in a live runway presentation at 608 Fifth Avenue. This finalists were all asked to create five looks using five types of Supima fabric: shirting, twill, denim, jersey, and velveteen.

The award’s elite panel of judges included Roach, Nicola Formichetti, Fern Mallis, Edward Barsamian, Luke Meagher, Kelly Augustine, Godfrey Deeny, Freya Drohan, Gianluca Longo, Emilia Petrarca, Avril Graham, Jerome Lamaar and the 2016 SDC winner, Jeffrey Taylor.

For his seventh year the CFDA award-winning eveningwear designer Bibhu Mohapatra joined as mentor to the finalists.

This year’s other five finalists were Cat Pfingst of Drexel University; Jiarui (Ruby) Cai of Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising; Yitao Li of the Fashion Institute of Technology; Alana Tolliver from Kent State University and Bora Kim of the School of Art Institute of Chicago.