Jillian Hackett wants to empower the next generation to find their perfect fit.

Jillian Hackett arrived at Texas Tech University already focused on her future. 

Sure, she saw before her the future many of her fellow 18-year-olds were thinking about: college classes, campus life and making new friends. But she also had a maturity, even then, that set her apart.

During her senior year of high school, the budding fashion designer launched her own brand, Lillian Jenae Designs, and won a national dress design contest. 

So, it should come as no surprise that, four years later, Hackett is still firmly focused on what comes next. She will graduate this weekend as the apparel design and manufacturing program’s 2024 Outstanding Senior, but she isn’t here to walk the stage. She’s in Seattle, where she’s working this summer as a fashion design intern for Nordstrom.

“I did their fashion ambassador program my senior year of high school,” she explains. “So that’s how I got started with them. I started in their high school program at my local store and then was able to kind of find my way here to corporate.”

It’s a remarkable ascent for a young designer, but don’t be fooled – it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing.

Remember that dress design contest? When she was named the winner in January 2020, Hackett was thrilled to learn her design would actually be mass produced and sold for the 2021 prom season. And even better, from her perspective, she would get to participate in the production process at each step, collaborating with brands like Faviana and SCALA to shape the gown’s progress.

Then, as with so many other plans that year, COVID-19 intervened. Those collaborative meetings for her gown design were delayed from summer to winter, then to spring break, then canceled entirely. Production paused due to uncertainty about whether there would even be a 2021 prom season. It was never resumed.

So, this internship has been even sweeter because of the opportunities it’s provided. In many ways, her work there has been similar to the experience she would have gained with her gown, if all had gone according to plan.

“A lot of it is assessing different steps of the process,” she says. “I’m learning from some senior designers, and I’m able to see all of the different steps in the design process. And so, really, I’m just helping out in any way I can and learning a whole lot about how things go from being a concept to being on the floor.”

It’s knowledge she’s translating into promoting Lillian Jenae Designs.

“For my senior project, I worked on creating a streetwear collection, which for me was a bit more outside my comfort zone,” she notes. “A lot of my work had been more in feminine daywear, formal and bridal. I want to be able to take my brand and implement it in a way that caters more to the streetwear customer.

“My plans are to continue learning from seasoned designers in the industry and then take those lessons and apply them to my own brand in order to eventually scale it up into a larger, more publicly understood and known label.”

She’s already made a good start. Even before coming to Texas Tech, her brand caught the eye of Oxford Fashion Studios, a London-based company that helps launch the careers of independent fashion designers. They asked her to develop an eight-look collection that would debut during New York Fashion Week. In September 2022, that dream became a reality. 

And since then, she’s shown her creations at Austin Fashion Week (twice) and Texas Fashion Week. She also regularly promotes her work through an active social media presence.

But there is undoubtedly a gap between designing one outfit – or even a series of outfits – and figuring out, logistically, how to manufacture thousands of them. Understanding that scaling-up process, she says, is a lot of what she’s gained in the apparel design and manufacturing program at Texas Tech.

“Really, starting the program, you learn the creative side, but then you have to learn how to implement,” Hackett says. “I feel like the program does a really great job of being able to help you build that portfolio through your different classes, being able to implement it and understand how the process is going to work on a much larger scale. I think for me, being able to visualize the scaling-up process as an apparel designer is really what the program enabled me to do.”

Along the way, she realized that, even with as much industry knowledge as she brought in, she gained infinitely more.

“The biggest challenge for me in the past four years has been being willing to admit that I don’t know it all,” she laughs. “I think going into the program, I initially was like, ‘Oh, I’ll know most of this.’ The truth is, you don’t know half of it, and that’s OK; you’re not supposed to know it. So that’s something I had to kind of work with myself on, especially in the earlier parts of being at school. Now I definitely think I’m much better at being an active learner, and I think that’s come to be one of my greatest strengths. 

“There’s always going to be something to learn, and there's always going to be someone with more expertise than you, and that should never be a problem. If you look at it through that lens, everything is an opportunity to grow or to learn or to build a connection.”

That’s why, as she now steps out into the professional world, she’s keeping her options open and just seeing what happens. For at least the next decade, she wants to really focus on learning and pushing herself to give 110% every day. Beyond that, the sky’s the limit.

“I want to be able to say that I contributed to empowering the next generation to be willing to learn, to be comfortable enough in their own skin to pursue what they want,” she says. “Leaving it better than I found it is something I want to be able to say I did, but being able to empower the people I meet along the way is the biggest thing, even if that’s through just day-to-day interactions at my job or through my business.” 

She’s especially grateful to the faculty members in apparel design and manufacturing – especially her mentor Mahendran Balasubramanian – because that’s what they’ve done for her.

As she contemplates the end of her education, at least formally, she also has one piece of advice for those coming after her.

“To the people who are now seniors, there is no opportunity that is too small,” she says. “For me, the largest part of the past four years has been, if you want to do it, you will. And if you don’t want to do it, you’ll make excuses.

“But there is no goal that is unattainable if you’re willing to put in the time, effort and commit yourselves to what you want to achieve.”