FEATURED STORY
When Life’s a Runway
BY TY DEMARTINO ’90
The great fashion designers take chances. They buck trends. They go with their instincts. FSU alum Scholastique Koolimo ’11 is living her life in that same creative spirit.
For Koolimo, life has been a series of drawing sketches. If they don’t work for her, she rips them out of her pad, crumples them up and draws again – like any good designer would do. As a result, Koolimo has lived out a lifelong dream as a creative director at the 2021 New York Fashion Week. But her road to the runway has been filled with personal quick changes, bold choices and her own colorful style.
“As a young girl, I was into fashion and theatre, but I never took it seriously. No one ever thinks that these things can come true,” Koolimo said last fall, fresh back from Fashion Week. “At least, I didn’t.”
Koolimo’s journey to Frostburg State University also had its own unique and dramatic flair. A refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo, she moved to the U.S. with her single mother and settled in Riverdale, Md. When it came time for college, Koolimo’s high school principal suggested FSU.
Scholastique Koolimo (center) backstage at New York Fashion Week.
“It was the first school I got into,” Koolimo recalled. “I didn’t look at tuition or anything. … That acceptance letter was everything.”
When she received her first tuition bill during her first semester, Koolimo did not have any idea how to pay it. She quickly turned to FSU’s Financial Aid Office and learned the significance of scholarships, especially for first-generation students from lower-income homes.
“[Those scholarships] are important, especially for minority students who need financial support to stay in college,” she said. “If that money wasn’t there, I just would have gone back home.”
The FSU Financial Aid team worked with Koolimo in finding qualifying aid, work study opportunities and emergency funding. “They knew I was trying. And they knew I needed to be there.”
With aid in place and a place to stay, Koolimo now faced one other small challenge – choosing a major. Her mother wanted her to be a doctor or an attorney, but since Koolimo “sucked really bad at science and math,” she strode into the Political Science Department with designs on becoming an immigration lawyer. There, she met Tim Magrath, director of FSU’s Beall Institute for Public Affairs, who also saw potential in Koolimo and set her up with a Beall Institute political internship in Annapolis.
“He was always my biggest advocate,” she said of Magrath. “He really challenged me and presented opportunities to me.”
Koolimo also was invited to participate in the University’s prestigious Sloop Institute for Excellence in Leadership. “I knew it was a big deal – meeting with alumni and learning about the importance of leadership,” she recalled. “I was always put in spaces that I wouldn’t normally have access to.”
But it was her other co-curricular activities that nurtured Koolimo’s artistic spirit. She became involved in the fledgling Visual Couture Runway Fashion Club. Koolimo started out as a runway model and then took on a leadership role. She learned the behind-the-scenes workings of how to load in high-end fashion shows. Those experiences at FSU awakened her hidden childhood dreams.
“I fell in love with it so much that when I left Frostburg, [fashion] became part of my identity.”
But as it was time for Koolimo to turn the page in her life’s sketchbook, the country was wrapped up in a recession. To make a living, Koolimo shelved her fashion dreams again and focused elsewhere, participating in AmeriCorps and teaching programs in the D.C. public school system, working for small businesses and eventually landing a job at a hair salon.
Koolimo quit to open her own small hair boutique. In her spare time, she blogged about fashion and attended runway shows. She started consulting for Macy’s, the Smithsonian Women’s Committee and on high-end productions such as Cardi B and Lil Uzi Vert videos.
Before the pandemic hit, Koolimo got pregnant, and decided to close down the business, move in with her mother and start over. She had to erase and redraw her plans once again.
She returned to working in a law office to support her son, that is, until this past September. Celebrity stylist Ariella Faith asked Koolimo to join her team at New York Fashion Week to style designers Dur Duox, a Washington, D.C.-based design house run by the mother/daughter team of Cynthia and Najla Burt. Koolimo parted ways with the law firm to follow her passion once more.
“There’s no guide on how to get [to Fashion Week],” she said. “And it’s not a space where you see a lot of minorities.”
Koolimo acknowledged using the leadership and networking skills she honed at Frostburg. “When I took those opportunities, like the Beall Institute and working in Annapolis, I was often the only minority there,” she noted. Those experiences could be uncomfortable, “but many of those skills have helped me.”
Koolimo (right) with celebrity stylist Ariella Faith.
She is now busy and content with her current path in life. Koolimo has officially marketed her fashion skills in her public relations company, Skye Charlie, LLC, and is “treating her business like a business.” In less then six months, she has negotiated five-figure contracts and has a team of creatives that she pays.
“As a creative director, I derive my inspiration from people, places and personal experiences,” her website, skyecharlie.co, states. “My goal is to use my experiences and observations to tell stories about Black and marginalized people.”
She has accomplished the same mission in her personal life.
“Hey! Look at me; I’m a refugee. It can happen,” she said with a laugh. “I’m just so comfortable with myself now. I know what industry I want to be in and what I want to do.”
That kind of confidence never goes out of style.