Melody Hirsch's parents were hippies; she doesn't want me to tell you her middle name because she thinks it's too girly and frilly and makes her sound like a made up character [it does]. She grew up in Seattle, in the poorer part of Magnolia, literally on the wrong side of the tracks, where the neighborhood families had open doors and let neighborhood children wander around, which is pretty cool if the drummer from Pearl Jam is one of your least-cool neighbors.
The neighborhood weirdoes and artists made a profound impression on Melody; she spent time with the painter who lived near by and the paraplegic who evangelized the future of fabrics come to present day in the form of Lycra and nylon. She was born with the heart of an inventor and explorer, her scientist’s mind tried on the hobbies and passions of her older brother, including sports and video games, before judiciously rejecting them in favor of the arts. She and her childhood best friend, Harmony [yup, Melody and Harmony] still cherish their ever-expanding dream to build a house out of recycled glass bottles and to create an ultrasonic device that will summon all the cats of Seattle to do their bidding, mostly chores.
Melody began apprenticing with her mom who made clothing and costumes. She initially thought she’d like to design and make clothing for film and theater until she realized that the clothes used in entertainment didn’t meet her standards for quality and durability. Melody later enrolled in the New York Fashion Academy in Ballard. Her feelings about fashion began to evolve as she saw the less-beautiful sides of the industry. She became fascinated with the human-element, she wanted to design clothes to be worn by real people—you might call it a passion for user experience. She wanted to change the fashion industry from the inside out by creating clothes that were cool, durable and lasting, with enduring style; start a revolution by politicizing fashion for social impact. She fell in love with the independent designers and shops and dug deeper into her education, even teaching some of the classes herself. All of this culminated in Melody showing three of her pieces at the Seattle Art Museum’s Future Beauty Community Night Out Runway Show.
Concurrent with her fashion design courses, she enrolled in a Graphic Design class at the New York Fashion Academy – she had a natural instinct for it and with encouragement from her professor, she began to reach deeper into the possibilities of Graphic Design, the potential to create thought-provoking original work and of reaching a broader audience. She set her sights on Seattle Central where she’s going to start changing the world as she learns more about packaging, branding, way-finding and, tentatively, UX.
Melody was traveling in Rome when she was locked out of her walk-up during a torrential downpour. She and her friend rang every apartment to get out of the storm without luck when they were rescued by a local no-nonsense woman in amazing Italian stilettos – she managed to call all the apartments until she found the correct one and got them out of the pouring rain. Later, Melody found out that the woman was actually a radical politician in the midst of highly politicized election.
While touring with a choir in Germany after the 2006 World Cup, she stayed at a hotel where the first thing she noticed were rabbits and peacocks who roamed free in the lobby, the second was the Brazil Soccer team who had missed their flight or something, but she thinks the politician is a cooler story.
Last but not least, Melody has the coolest bucket-list of anyone I know and I hope she let’s me tag along on her adventures:
1) Live outside Seattle
2) Create something to promote social change
3) Own a potbelly pig
4) Live on a houseboat
5) Learn to fly a plane
More about Melody at her website: Melody Hirsch Designs: Seattle Fashion Designer