Amboy teen earns full Portland Fashion Institute scholarship

An Amboy teen’s interest in pushing the boundaries and what is considered normal in fashion has paid dividends with a $20,000 Portland Fashion Institute scholarship

Battle Ground River Homelink graduate Aidan Clause will attend the fashion institute for two years to earn an associate degree because of his transformational clothing. Clause also attended the Cascadia Technical Academy’s fashion program, which he said contributed greatly to earning the scholarship.

“With getting the scholarship, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Cascadia,” he said. “The skills that I learned there helped me incredibly with that. But the scholarship itself, like the meat and potatoes of it, was a three-minute video that I had to craft up and just talking about what I think about fashion and then showcasing my designs.”

To earn his scholarship, Clause showed off his transformational clothing items on stage in a fashion show. From pants that can widen and change length to a shirt that becomes a skirt to a tote bag that turns into a trench coat, his designs impressed the crowd.

“So the big one, I called it the star of the show, were these pants that I made, and the whole concept of my fashion show was centered around finding creative ways to make modular clothing and just have a very utilitarian, but still kind of costumey and like a bit excessive [design] because it’s still fashion at the end of the day,” Clause said. “These pants have zippers down the front of the legs [so] you can widen the already-wide leg, and then the main thing that’s kind of the interesting part about them is they have this hook that you can alter the length of the leg by hooking the pants up higher.”

After showcasing the pants and shirt/skirt, Clause showcased his tote bag to the crowd.

“The thing that I wanted everybody to be surprised about was I was carrying this tote bag for the entire fashion show and the goal of it was, ‘Oh yeah, it’s just the bag on the shoulder or whatever,’ but then at the very end, I unzipped it, and it unzipped into a full trench coat, and I threw on the trench coat, and everybody went, ‘Oh my gosh, I didn’t expect that,’ ” Clause said.

After finding a niche for fashion during the COVID-19 pandemic, he developed a liking for a rebellious attitude that he promotes through his clothing designs. He said he has thought of brand concepts in the past with one he named “Change Is” inspiring some of his fashion designs.

“I’m super into punk fashion, and, like I said, what I’m interested in fashion is just pushing the boundaries outside of what is considered normal,” he said. “I really am interested in fashion as like an art form and like a way to kind of convey an idea or a point. And even with this fashion show, though I didn’t push it at all, the whole point of it was the clothes change and that the kind of message of that is just change is good and that it’s very simple. Change is usually a good thing, and people need to be more open to change.”