A Life By Design

Winter 2025
By Sarah Rufca Nielsen ’05
Photos By Jeff Fitlow

In Paris’ famed Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood, where bustling streets hum with history and café terraces buzz with quiet charm, Deanne Nguyen ’11 is watching snow flurries brush against her windows and savoring a macaron from the Ladurée patisserie around the corner. Nguyen, the head of atelier at luxury fashion label Steven Passaro, represents a new generation of creatives who transcend traditional boundaries between art and science. Her journey from Rice to the City of Light, and to a career in fashion design, was a winding path marked by doubt, self-discovery and an unrelenting curiosity about what might be possible. 

Raised in Houston as the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants, Nguyen felt the tug of fashion from a young age, yet did everything in her power to ignore it. Her mother had dreamed of being an architect but settled for a practical career in accounting. That choice loomed large in Nguyen’s mind. “It’s not that my parents ever discouraged me — it’s not the first-generation immigrant stereotype. I made up these narratives in my head,” she says. “I didn’t feel like I deserved an artistic life.”

Instead, she followed what she thought was the responsible path. At Rice, Nguyen initially studied chemistry, before realizing she couldn’t see herself working in a lab for the rest of her life. She switched her major to linguistics, embracing a love of language that had taken root at age 15 during her first trip to Vietnam.

Outside of class, her closet became her creative outlet. Her style was colorful and unapologetically maximalist, inspired by Tokyo’s over-the-top Harajuku street fashion subcultures.

“I went to great lengths to not dress like a Rice person,” Nguyen laughs. If she couldn’t figure out her outfit, she’d skip class altogether. 

After graduating in 2011, Nguyen moved to Korea to teach English. Eventually, she landed a corporate copywriting job in Seoul, the kind of role that brought in a decent paycheck but slowly made her miserable. She couldn’t shake the persistent, gnawing feeling that she wasn’t doing the work she was supposed to be doing. “My intuition just woke up one day, and I felt it pushing me back into this dream I had of working in fashion, this dream that had been buried under self-doubt,” she says. For the first time, she listened.

An Origin Story

In spring 2017, Nguyen moved to Japan and enrolled at the Tokyo campus of ESMOD, one of France’s oldest fashion schools. When her professor suggested she spend her final year in Paris, Nguyen hesitated. Japan has long been her cultural touchstone, from her Harajuku era to her current obsession with the midcentury Showa aesthetic. Paris was never part of her plan. But she took a leap of faith — and found a surprising fit.

“I’m an anxious person in part because I’m a romantic and poetic soul,” Nguyen says. “And the French people, that resonates with them. As a designer, the less you have to explain yourself, the more you can just vibe and evolve. I fell in love with being in Paris.”

Although she’d originally hoped to work at one of the major fashion houses, her interest in 3D pattern-making software, sustainable fashion and a shared design sensibility landed her an internship with Passaro. Launched in 2020, Steven Passaro’s eponymous collections blend traditionally gendered concepts of tailoring and dressmaking, infusing garments with poetry and architectural precision. Featured in British Vogue, GQ and Harper’s BAZAAR Man, the label has been worn by international style icons such as Paul Forman (“Emily in Paris”).

Rising to the role of head of atelier in 2024, Nguyen is in charge of making sure the collections are produced in line with Passaro’s vision as the creative director. Traditionally, fashion houses divide their workflow into a design studio, where the creative vision for a collection or garment is incubated, and a pattern-making division, which translates this artistic rendering into a blueprint for the fabrics and trims to be used and the specifications for construction. But at a small label like Steven Passaro, both processes coexist in the atelier.

It’s a role that combines her artistic instincts with her analytical mind. “I’m the link between the design side and the production side,” she explains. “As a cerebral person, I have to get into my body, and that’s why I like pattern-making.”

From Pattern to Prototype 

Passaro and his team have integrated cutting-edge technology from Style3D (a digital pattern-making software) into their design process, reducing cost, time and waste. Whether for the brand’s ready-to-wear collections or custom design commissions, all garments still begin with a hand-drawn sketch to capture the technical details and overall style of a look. 

Any fabric the atelier works with can be digitized to assess not only its color and pattern, but also the weight, luminosity, thickness and stretchiness of the fabric. Once uploaded, the technology previews how the fabric would look and drape if turned into a T-shirt, a pleated skirt, a pair of trousers, etc.

“In the luxury industry you can have more than nine iterations as part of the research and development process — it’s such a huge waste,” says Nguyen. “Using this software, we go directly from pattern to prototype without cutting any fabric, so it cuts down on waste. And since most of our stuff is made to measure, the prototype is perfectly fine for a fashion show.”

The benefits are significant. What once took a week can now be completed in two days, with unparalleled precision. Even complex tasks, like ensuring consistent print placement across sizing, can be resolved in seconds using Style3D. “It not only makes us competitive with prêt-à-porter, but also gives us the luxury of time,” Nguyen says. 

She’s tight-lipped about the fall/winter 2025 collection currently in production, which debuted during Paris Fashion Week in January. “It’s along the same vein as what Steven and I produce as romantic souls: delicate, bold, but confident,” she says. The label’s Instagram account offers an intriguing inspiration and cri de coeur: 

In a realm of judgment, where self-expression was forbidden, one found themselves cloaked in the pain and shame of difference, every layer a silent echo of their inner turmoil. But one day, amidst the whispers of doubt, one uncovered a shard of courage, gleaming in the darkness, urging them to weave their truth into a tapestry of self-acceptance. … The act of adorning oneself in these fabrics became a ritual, a daily affirmation of one’s worth … not just attire but armour, crafted from the very soul of resilience. Through fashion, one declared their firm right to exist, to be seen, and to celebrate the beauty of being uniquely oneself.

Reflecting on her educational journey, Nguyen still feels like Rice was the right choice. “I can see the difference in how I operate in the fashion world,” she says. “In fashion school, both in Tokyo and Paris, the students have a lot of creativity but less experience with critical thinking and analyzing the world around them. I have a more left-brained approach to fashion … things are more than just design.”

As Nguyen has reconnected with her alma mater in Paris (see “In Fashion” below), she hopes her story inspires other students to follow their intuition, even if it takes them on a winding path to self-discovery. “Finding your community and living life with honesty and integrity is a different type of success,” she says. “Don’t be told by society to ‘find yourself.’ Now is the time to get a little bit lost. To wander.” 
 

In Fashion

In summer 2024, an impromptu visit to the Rice Global Paris Center brought Deanne Nguyen full circle to her alma mater. She had no idea the center existed until a visiting college friend suggested stopping by the campus, a charming 16th-century townhouse and courtyard in the heart of the Marais.

That’s where Nguyen ran into bioengineer Matthew Wettergreen ’08 and students from Rice’s International Summer Experience in Engineering Design program, which for two weeks transformed the center’s wine cellar into a pop-up makerspace exploring accessibility and innovation. As the city hosted the 2024 Paralympic Games, the students worked on a project for a motorized wheelchair user in Paris, investigating how to improve mobility in a city notorious for its challenging urban infrastructure.     

This is something I would have loved as a student, seeing the integration of engineering and technology into real-world applications.

As they spoke, Wettergreen asked Nguyen if she would be interested in presenting for the students, and she jumped at the opportunity. Nguyen arranged a visit to the Style3D/Steven Passaro atelier, offering insights into how an industry as creative and tactile as high fashion is integrating technology into its business model. “This is something I would have loved as a student, seeing the integration of engineering and technology into real-world applications,” says Nguyen. “They were interested in the process. They were 19- and 20-year-olds thinking the way that professionals think.”

“The students had no idea how fashion works — I certainly didn’t,” Wettergreen admits. “In this program, even though it’s engineering, we can broaden the types of things that we include. Students were able to see firsthand how technical expertise can create meaningful change in unexpected fields.” Nguyen’s reconnection with Rice was more than happenstance. It reflected the deep ties that Rice alumni carry with them and the opportunities created by the university’s expanding global presence.  

Matthew Wettergreen is associate teaching professor in the Department of Bioengineering and at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen and director of the Global Medical Innovation Program.