Fashion Student Designs A&T-Inspired Collection for Urban Outfitters

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (Dec. 6, 2023) – In June 2022, fashion merchandising and design major Mya Harris flew to Philadelphia to attend a 10-week internship with apparel company Urban Outfitters. This fall, the result of that experience – a line of clothing paying tribute to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University’s cultural history – hit the shelves.

“A few sizes sold out in 10 days,” said Harris, a senior in the fashion merchandising and design program in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences. “For that to happen so quickly is great.”

Harris is one of five students from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) across the country who interned for Urban Outfitters’ Summer Class ‘22. Urban Outfitters asked its student participants to design an exclusive apparel and accessories assortment, inspired by their university, for its annual Capsule Collection.

Harris is the second N.C. A&T student to design for this collection. In 2021, fashion major U’lia Hargrove designed her own line of Aggie-inspired apparel for the Summer Class’ inaugural program in 2021. A year later, Samya Gilliam-Frazier, another alumna of the fashion merchandising and design department, designed a clothing line for Bohemian fashion and lifestyle retailer Free People.

There are six pieces in Harris’ line: a flannel shirt, a bomber jacket, jeans, a trucker hat and a scarf. Each is unique in its depiction of the university and its history. For Harris, that meant digging through A&T’s photographic records and archives for inspiration.

“For the flannel shirt, I went deep into looking for something that not a lot of people had seen,” said Harris. “I designed the shirt from images taken at a game that I found in the 1982 yearbook. Aggie Pride is the obvious message and people had it on their signs. I wanted to show that this is nothing new. This is something that we’ve been doing since 1891.”

Harris’ bomber jacked hones in on the historic value of the university’s name changes.

“It shows how dynamic we are and how we’ve grown as a university from the name we had in 1891 to now,” she said. The sleeve has a “fact sheet” to help customers understand “why our university is so special,” she said.

Associate Professor Elizabeth Newcomb-Hopfer, Ph.D., praised Harris’ ability to merge her vision with the Urban Outfitters brand.

“We teach students about the complexities involved in product development across the supply chain,” said Newcomb-Hopfer, “but the teaching comes to life when students work through this transformation in their internships.”

To view Harris’ line and the full Summer Class ‘22 collection, go to https://www.urbanoutfitters.com/uo-summer-class. Proceeds from the collection support a $55,000 donation to participating HBCUs, according to Urban Outfitters’ website.