KEITH ENRIQUEZ/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Fourth-year Laneia Moore has a new line of loungewear featured in Fred Segal. All proceeds will benefit AIDS clinics in Africa.
By Barbara McGuire
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Laneia Moore is proof that a student’s major doesn’t always need to correlate with her future endeavors.
An African American studies student, Moore doesn’t plan on finding a job related to this field after graduating in June. Instead, she’s planning on going into fashion design.
“They’re not anyhow or anywhere related, but there is something about the environment of college that always makes you look for some sort of alternative to the status quo,” Moore said. “I don’t want to get a job; I want to do something else.”
Moore has already started working on her dream of becoming a fashion designer with her “FantasyGirl” line of loungewear that can be found starting today at the retail store Fred Segal in Santa Monica. Two other trendy boutiques, Buffalo Exchange in Los Angeles and Blonde in Santa Monica, are also currently carrying unique pieces of Moore’s loungewear line.
Wonnie Park, a buyer for Fred Segal, said she selected Moore’s loungewear line because it was innovative and fresh – something hard to come by in a fashion world currently dominated by reproduction. The collection consists of matching sets of tees and hot pants decorated with paints and jewels.
“It’s for the girl who wants to be sexy all the time,” Park said. “It’s a hybrid between a bikini outfit and an old T-shirt ... and it’s for a very particular kind of customer, but that’s what makes it good and unique.”
In addition to the unique style of “FantasyGirl,” it also has an underlying charitable purpose. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of the loungewear pieces will go to the Aid to Africa Project, a non-profit organization Moore started about a year ago, after seeing a startling “Newsweek” cover featuring a photo of an orphan from Africa.
“The face of this child was helpless, innocent, and the title said ‘10 Million Orphans,’” Moore said. “It was really shocking to me that 10 million children are orphans without moms and dads ... because it was such a serious pandemic of such serious proportions that that day I decided to do something.”
Moore said she called up her friend Dr. Tarik Allen, a UCLA alumnus of both the undergraduate and law school, to see if he would be interested in helping her find some type of organization which could provide aid to the struggling orphanages in Africa. Allen, who is now a board member of the Aid to Africa Project, said he was interested in the project from the get-go because he had seen the lack of funding problems face to face while studying abroad in South Africa.
“When she told me about this, it just really sparked my thoughts as far as what we could do for the orphans and children of Africa, where there are just so many people that are diagnosed with AIDS,” Allen said in a phone interview from his home in Northern California.
Moore said the Aid to Africa Project is currently working on mobilizing its resources. They are finding sponsors and raising capital to send to charity organizations in Africa that will use the money for things such as paying the salary of nurses and doctors. Moore said many might have seen her on Bruin Walk, where she often sits holding up a sign promoting her project.
“Our end goal is to make an impact on the ground itself, but in essence, that takes time and it also takes a certain amount of money,” Allen said. “Your goal is always to help somebody help themselves. We hope to change the atmosphere on the ground and give people more hope of an opportunity to survive.”
Moore said although the UCLA community isn’t currently involved in the organization, she hopes to get support from it down the line. She plans on having a fashion show where pieces from the loungewear line with celebrity signatures will be auctioned off, with all of the proceeds benefiting the Aid to Africa Project.
Though Moore admits to the lack of congruency between her major and career choice; she believes that just being a Bruin has affected her life in innumerable ways and helped her in reaching her goals.
“There is something in the environment here that breeds socially conscious, aware, innovative kinds of people, and it’s built into our university system,” Moore said.
“It makes me look at the world a lot differently than if I hadn’t had the same sort of education,” she continued. “It helps me not to be scared too. Something about this university breeds this sort of fearlessness, and you’re just not afraid to take a chance.”