Nadia Manjarrez
"There is a staircase that leads to your most delightful dreams. The elevator is permanently out of service."
Nadia is a New York based Mexican fashion designer and product developer. Born a millennial in Culiacan, Mexico. Nadia shared her parent’s attention with three other siblings; potential reason to her loud voice. Raised by a family of printers she developed a taste for visuals that later translated into fashion design. As a good nerd, she obtained the excellency award in thesis when she graduated from Fashion and Textile Design in Universidad de Monterrey. It took only a couple of weeks in an intensive fashion course at Parsons in New York City to seal the love for the industry and the city she now lives in.
Diploma in hand, she quickly moved to NYC to start an internship as the Jack-of-all-trades-want-to-make-it-big girl with Indian Couture designer Bibhu Mohapatra, who was part of the CFDA Fashion Incubator. In such a small team, Nadia was able to gain hands on experience in every part of the business.
The game changer was Badgley Mischka. She started working for the fantastic American duo in 2012 as a Production Manager. But the right side of her brain was feeling hungry, so she soon migrated to the design department to create and develop the opening price point line called “Mark & James”.
In 2015, she embarked on a new adventure to Marchesa, where she worked as a Product Developer and Specials Designer for the the line “NOTTE”. Her job was to translate the creative information to a production “language” and to design the most competitively priced styles of the line for each season.
Later, Nadia worked for American brand Cushnie et Ochs and later created advanced contemporary evening wear brand Flor et.al. Along with Karin Gardkvist and Milad Khoreibani, Nadia identified a void in the market for fun, unconventional evening dresses and created this brand with an ethical perspective in mind, from fair pay to sustainable sourcing practices.
Nadia describes herself as the annoying classmate in elementary school that would always ask too many questions. As of today, that part has remained intact.
