Shelley Fralic: Rocking a custom-made fashion career

They say that if you can find a job doing what you love, you will never work a day in your life.

A bit of optimistic hyperbole, perhaps, but if you ask Nicole Guzzo, it’s not far off the mark.

Guzzo is 24, and fully immersed in a career that started way back when she was getting dressed for kindergarten.

You see, Guzzo always had a sense of fashion, so much so that she was mixing and matching outfits and coming up with interesting ensembles at the age of three, stubbornly insisting to her bemused parents that her style was hers alone.

And so it was all through school — Guzzo was the girl who showed up for the first day of middle school in combat boots, fishnets and a miniskirt, owning the look.

It’s not hard to imagine though, once you meet her, what with the teased hair dyed in Vampire Red — “people know me for my pouf” — and the tattoos and lip piercing and, yes, the rock ’n’ roll vibe of the leopard shrug and cheeky tank and pleather swing mini skirt she’s wearing on this average work day.

The pieces are from her own line, Nicole Guzzo Designs, which she started after graduating in 2012 from the four-year Kwantlen Fashion Design and Technology program, and which she creates and sews to order in her studio in Coquitlam, the town where she grew up and still lives.

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The course taught her the intricacies not only of graphics and pattern-making but business and sewing (the latter enhancing skills she learned from her grandmother and in Home Ec), all of it solidifying her drive to be an independent fashion designer.

Oh, her instructors tried to talk her out of her rock ‘n’ roll inclinations, she says, insisting there wasn’t much of a market for it in Vancouver, even though the menswear pieces she produced for her graduation show were such a big hit that orders began piling up in her inbox.

“Most grads went into design for Lululemon and other companies,” she says. “I just thought, this is not for me. I just couldn’t imagine losing control. I always said I’m doing my own thing right after school.”

So she set up a website to take online orders, and began showing her designs at shows around town, including at Men’s Fashion Week in Vancouver in 2012 (which featured her snakeskin pants) and soon the orders started coming in.

She bought two used industrial sewing machines — a Toyota and a Juki serger — and became a regular shopper at Fabricana. Designing and sewing became her life, when she wasn’t working part-time at a local bar to pay the bills.

“I just started posting things I had made, on my website and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram — pictures of dresses that I was making, coats and skirts, and people started understanding what I was doing, and started asking me to custom make these things.”

She created a $40 bandeau shaped like a bow — she calls it the Bow Top — and suddenly she could barely keep up with the demand. A faux-fur vest received much the same reaction, and then along came her street line, Rebel Up.