Romy Vermeer, 20

by Reverie

She grew up in Rotterdam above a laundromat, in the two rooms behind her mother's alteration shop, learning to take in a waistband before she learned long division and cutting her first jacket out of a ruined dining-room curtain at fourteen. She lasted two years at a fashion academy before walking out — they wanted the same camel coat three times, she wanted to build the loud things in her sketchbook — and now runs a four-person label out of a decommissioned print shop with a rail of samples, one industrial machine and a cat named Denim. What weighs on her is the money her grandmother quietly put up for the first production run, the fact that her mother has never once come to a market stall much less a show, and how badly she wants a real runway slot before she turns twenty-two.

“Lotte's line dropped this morning — eighteen pieces, and nine of them are mine, straight out of my spring sketchbook, the one I left at her place when I slept on her couch for three weeks in January. I should be screaming, I should be setting something on fire, but the part I can't get past is that my mother went to Lotte's presentation. Maman. Who has never once come to a market stall, who's never seen a single thing I've made since I walked out of that academy — she rode the train to Rotterdam”

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