Fashion designer Gail Barry knew since she was in the sixth grade she wanted to design clothing. She has gone from experimenting with her own clothes to designing casual elegant linen wear for men and women in the Taraji Design Group.
As a youngster she jumped on her mom’s sewing machine and just started to experiment.
“I read a lot of books on sewing,” Barry says. “I sat down and did it my way, and years later I realized the way to do it.”
Barry says she comes from a vocational-minded family that does a lot of hands-on projects. She went from experimenting to learning the basics from local programs to college.
She learned sewing basics in home economics at Elena Christian Jr. High and public housing summer camps. She also went to 4-H cooperative extension summer camp at the University of the Virgin Islands.
“I loved the 4-H camp program,” Barry says. “At 15, I knew for sure this was what I wanted to do as a career.”
While she was a student at St. Croix Central High School, she also took sewing classes at St. Croix Career Technical and Educational Center (CTEC).
“I started to explore at CTEC and began to satisfy my curiosity about menswear,” Barry says.
During a recent interview, she showed a men’s suit and very professionally done dress shirt she made at CTEC.
By the tenth grade she was actually selling her designs to friends and through word of mouth, building up a client base that grew and grew.
“I’m a curious learner and never felt I had learned enough,” Barry says. “I wanted to learn more and the opportunity wasn’t here on St. Croix.”
She attended UVI, but the design classes she craved were not available. Barry moved to Florida and looked into design school, but the cost was prohibitive. She continued to look for a way to get design training. She eventually ended up at Houston Community College and, in 2007, she got an associate’s degree in fashion design.
Her defining moment at college was when she worked with and fell in love with linen fabric. Once she started producing pieces in linen, her teachers told her “don’t touch anything else.”
She has done just that, and linen has become her signature fiber.
“I love the way linen falls, moves, and washes,” Barry says. The colors she uses are of the Caribbean, and the fabric is cool.
Barry is a member of the Taraji Design Group out of Milan, Italy. Her goal is to expand as the design coordinator of the Caribbean branch and do more on its website. She has risen beyond being a seamstress and feels she has re-energized the design business on St. Croix.
“You have to have a love for design and put energy in it to be a success,” Barry says.
