Leaving a small town to become a big city designer

Allie Doty grew up in St. Charles, Minnesota, a small town of about 3,000 where, she said, most people either become farmers or nurses.

But she decided to become a fashion designer.

That career aspiration came with a price, Doty said. She knows she can never stay in the small town that nurtured her dreams, where her grandmother helped her practice sewing and where she stayed home doing crafts, or watching Project Runway.

To pursue her career in retail merchandising and design, she had to leave home. Now, she’s studying retail merchandising at the University of Minnesota –Twin Cities, where she expects to graduate in 2021. She knows, too, that she will likely never be able to return to that small town once she finds work in her field.

“It does make me seem like I’m ‘sick’ of the small town or that it wasn’t enough for me, but it was,” Doty said. “I just have other interests that I can’t fulfill in my hometown.”

Growing up, it wasn’t always clear to Doty that fashion was a career path. High school discussions about life plans usually didn’t include her love for design or clothes.

“When we were talking about jobs and colleges, we didn’t really explore those creative jobs or like design majors,” Doty said. “That wasn’t really introduced.”

But while Doty may not have had access to trendy clothing stores, fashion icons or a creative environment in general, her family tried to fill in for her passion. She took shopping trips to the city with her grandma who influenced her perspective of fashion and made up for the weak opportunity in small towns.

“My parents were always trying their hardest to introduce me to other things like traveling and going into the city for the weekend or something,” Doty said. “I feel like I got the awesome benefits of living in a small town… feeling that sense of community like no matter where you are in St. Charles, but I still got to experience the highlights of living in a city without all the chaos.”

After graduating from St. Charles High School, Doty knew she needed to strike out. But she felt the need to attend a smaller university, so she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin –Stout to stay in her comfort zone. After her first year, though, she knew she had to jump into the fray and transfer to the University of Minnesota –Twin Cities’ competitive design school.

Located in the middle of the Twin Cities design community, the College of Design and the U of MN includes a full range of design pathways. With eight undergraduate majors, 23 graduate degree options, a 93 percent freshman retention rate and a 78 percent graduation rate, the design school would give Doty the opportunities she’d need to become who she wants to become.

For now, Doty knows she has given up living a small-town lifestyle for her career. But because she has a fierce passion for design and visual merchandising, Doty is pursuing fashion on the business level—something more than merely working in a store, she said.

That may include designing her own clothing line accessible to people within all kinds of environments—as she hopes to do someday—and may one day allow her to introduce fashion to smaller towns where people can express the full range of their personalities.

“A person is kind of a blank canvas until they start putting on their personality,” Doty said. “One of the ways they can do that is the way they dress and the pieces that they like.”