The Crusader: Norine Fuller
Norine Fuller is on a mission. From a small office on K Street, she is hard at work insuring the future of American fashion design. As executive director of the DC office for Los Angeles’s prestigious Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, it is her job to oversee the disbursement of the federal and state student financial aid programs for the college. “We were the first, I believe, to have our own freestanding office to represent these and other related issues,” says Fuller. Her goal? To provide opportunity to students pursuing careers in fashion. “When it comes to style, I really believe America has a global edge,” she says. “As budgets are squeezed, the most important endeavor is keeping our institution compliant, which, in turn, allows our students to maintain their access to our type of higher education.”
FIDM, widely regarded as one of the top fashion schools in the country, has churned success stories based on that platform: Pamela Skaist-Levy, cofounder of Juicy Couture, is an alumna, as are Project Runway season-five winner Leanne Marshall; Patricia Chan, the senior project designer for Barbie; bridal and eveningwear giant Monique Lhuillier; and Kelly Arsenian, menswear designer for True Religion, to name just a few.
Fuller started with a decidedly California-girl lifestyle (she was a beach volleyball player) before moving into retail fashion; her first job in the business was as a buyer for Buffum’s, a West Coast department-store chain. When she moved to Washington more than 20 years ago, she started as a part-time consultant for an international public and government relations firm. “I needed to understand how the city worked,” she explains. The rest of her week was spent developing what she wanted to do with FIDM, how she planned to introduce the school and its mission to Washington. “That meant knocking on a lot of doors and asking if I could have 10 minutes of people’s time just to come and say hello,” says Fuller. “Access and choice are reigning concepts when it comes to higher education, even in pursuit of fashion.”
Fuller’s cold-calling gave way to partnerships, open dialogue, esteem and, finally, positions of influence. She has been appointed by the Speaker of the House to the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance, and she is on The Kennedy Center’s National Committee for Performing Arts, which helps underwrite arts education programs. Additionally, Fuller has guided FIDM into high-profile partnerships with brands like Vitamin Water, and she has been instrumental with events such as FIDM’s presidential inaugural fashion show and Fashion for Paws. Witnessing the explosion of individuality in the District, she is consistently impressed by the trend toward fashion-forwardness. “When I came to Washington from Los Angeles, I naturally called Washington a town,” she says. “Today I can’t say that. Today DC is a vibrant, exciting city, and it’s expressing itself in so many stylistic forms.”
The scope of this transformation is not lost on Fuller, whose lobbying efforts on behalf of FIDM and the future of American fashion design run the gamut of the business. “There’s the textile industry, the shoe industry, the handbag industry, jewelry, the stylists, the product development; there’s marketing, there’s manufacturing. All of these, they help support the design industry, but they are all entities in and of themselves—and they must continue to evolve.”
“When I opened the FIDM DC office, my mission was to make sure that students studying nontraditional kinds of majors in college would maintain equal access to federal and state financial aid programs,” says Fuller. America is now on par with France, Italy and the other giants of fashion, and with that has come valuable insight into what it will take to succeed in the high-stakes industry. “If I look in my crystal ball, I believe those designers who stay focused and keep a fresh eye toward fiscal sensitivity will dominate the industry.”
