Mariah Rush is a 16-year-old westside student with and old soul, big dreams and a passion for fashion. She currently does fashion for Kent bellows program here in Omaha. Where she recently had her fashion, designs modeled on the runway in the annual spring Omaha fashion week on student night along with other students in the program and pick two students form each high school in the local area to have a mentor for the program.
Kent bellows a local mentorship program based on a local artist from Omaha. Which helps students be creative in various fields. Teens meet with mentors to help them be creative and to look at things with an artistic approach. They do it for 3 semesters for two years and
For Mariah it is about inspiring others through fashion. What inspires her the most is the way fashion is constant.
“I feel like fashion is a way for me to express myself, the way it constantly changes it represents how people and society change and evolve.”
She said that fashion is something she always has cared and had a passion about. From an early age she; loved dressing up her dolls and changing their outfits and making them her own. She also said she draws a lot of style inspiration from old movies from the 50s and 60s. one movie in particular is Funny Face with Audrey Hepburn. She said for the most part that she doesn’t ever plan most of her outfit designs out and that they just come to her.
“I always knew I wanted to dress like them so one day I just started putting outfits together and making clothes.”
She recently had her fashion designs modeled at this springs Omaha fashion week on student night. She was joined their by her friends and family and mentor Celeste Butler Where her and her fellow students of Kent bellows also had their outfits modeled and show on the runway.
“I liked seeing all of the other students and their designs, I also liked being around like-minded people there.”
Mariah also has some goals for herself and things she hopes to see in the upcoming Omaha fashion week. She said that diversity is important to her. She says that having plus size models and models of other skin tones is something she hopes for the next Omaha fashion week. She said that is something she hopes they can have more of. She has a dress she is working on now for the next Omaha fashion week which is a plus size wrap dress with flannel on one side and sunflowers on the other that she is excited to share next Omaha fashion week.
She said that diversity in fashion is important to her and a lot of young people today because growing up she never saw anybody that looked like her. In magazines or runways, the industry mostly had skinny, tall and blonde women doing fashion. She said that she wants to be seen and see people that look like her.
“I want to see people that look like me and my size especially as a black girl.”
Soon Mariah will be wrapping up her first year of the program and has big dreams of going to The fashion institute of technology for college when she graduates to study fashion and design clothes for models of all different shapes sizes and colors.
Owen Rush 