Oscar de la Renta

My name is Sophie Moore and I am a Junior Graphic Design Major. Over the summer of 2012, I was one of the two Graphic Design Interns for the fashion house, Oscar de la Renta. I was very lucky to have received this internship because it is very competitive to get internships in New York City especially with a fashion brand. Brockett Horn, the chair of the Graphic Design department at MICA, was the one who emailed me with the information about this internship. I immediately followed through and contacted Marissa Kraxberger, who was my supervisor throughout the internship. We had a phone interview and then that was that.

Oscar de la Renta is one of the oldest and most well known American fashion designers. His brand now consists of Ready to Wear, Resort, Bridal, Fragrance and Children’s. The team is small for a well-known fashion brand but has many hardworking talented people. One of the many talented people on the Oscar team was my internship supervisor, Marissa Kraxberger, who was just recently employed as the Head of the Creative team. Besides Oscar, Marissa has worked for other brands including Diane Von Furstenberg and Kate Spade.

During my internship, the brand was in the process of redesigning their website. So a lot of my time was spent preparing assets for the new site. This included cropping photos, helping with photo shoots, laying out type assets, while also helping to maintain the old site. We would design things for every part of the Oscar brand. People from the other areas would bring project request forms to the creative team where then the whole team would work together to create them. Throughout this internship I was the most proud of how comfortable and easy the work became. Me and the other intern were given full project request forms to complete. Of course these projects passed through many eyes until completion but the fact that I knew I was able to complete that level of work really was exciting to know. 

My internship experience was definitely challenging at times because of the completely new world I was working in that was much different that what I had experienced at MICA. But once I got used to it I really learned so much valuable information about the process and stages of fashion brands. It is a busy world that is constantly one step ahead to be creating for the next season. I also learned a lot of about using the Adobe programs in a super efficient way. I feel like I understand the fashion world way more than I ever thought I would and could easily pick it up whenever. That will be the most helpful thing down the road when applying to other fashion brands. I expect a lot of changes in the next two years, so I am keeping my future open but at this point in time I would be thrilled to have my career end up being part of a creative team in the fashion world.