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Nasheli Ortiz-González knew she wanted to be a fashion designer at age 13 when she sewed her first piece of clothing.
It was an eye-catching pair of shorts made of leopard fabric and elastic. Looking back, she says “it was a terrible outfit” now that she knows the fashion codes, but her teenager self never thought that. And eventually, her pieces would make it to Vogue and Fashion Week on the runways of London, Paris, and New York.
Even with these successes, “I didn’t feel like a designer because of imposter syndrome,” Ortiz-González said to Billy Penn.
That feeling of insecurity returned two years ago, as she applied for the role of executive director of Taller Puertorriqueño, a community-based cultural organization dedicated to preserving, developing, and promoting Puerto Rican arts and culture in Philadelphia.
Despite friends saying, “This job is for you,” she was skeptical that she was the right person. Ultimately, her 20-plus-year career as a designer, activist, professor, and businesswoman worked in her favor.
“Everything I’ve done has been for the people,” she said of her career journey. “This position is a dream, and it’s a privilege to be at Taller.”
As director, Ortiz-González works to highlight the best of Puerto Rican culture and serves as a bridge for the arts between the island and boricuas in the diaspora.
Philadelphia has the second-largest Puerto Rican population in the U.S., many of them in North Philly, where they comprise 80% of the neighborhood’s Hispanic population, Ortiz-González said in an interview with El Nuevo Día.
‘People have saved me’
Ortiz-González’s journey from aspiring designer to community leader had its ups and downs. Being a single mother and a Latina in the fashion industry was a challenge, she said, due to exclusion and systemic racism.
For example, when she was 23 years old and applying to study fashion in New York, one of the professors, who knew Ortiz-González was pregnant with her first child, dismissively told her that she should be a mother before becoming a designer.
She didn’t get to study at that university, but one of the judges in the application process was renowned Dominican designer Oscar de la Renta. The jury’s challenge was to make a piece with unusual materials, and Ortiz-González decided to make a dress with umbrellas. De la Renta was impressed and gave her her first internship.
“[De la Renta] told me that I was going to be a great designer,” she said.
In 2017, Ortiz-González took London Fashion Week by storm when she dressed Dominican model and influencer Lili Gatins. Vogue cameras captured the outfit, which attracted so much attention that Vogue contacted the designer to collaborate.
“People have saved me,” she said. “The community and recommendations have always been there when I’ve needed them the most.”
Her most recent milestone was participating in the Netflix competition Next in Fashion. Ortiz-González participated along with 20 other designers around the world. After the show became popular in 2020, the designer noticed that she was also becoming more recognizable to fans on the street.
Art as a lifesaver
Ortiz-González was born and raised in Caguas, Puerto Rico, and at two years old contracted meningitis, which left her in a coma. She stopped speaking and eating and eventually, her mother put her in ballet classes to develop her motor skills.
Then, when she was in the first grade, after an accident left her mother in a wheelchair, young Ortiz-González moved in with her mom’s friend, who was an art teacher, until becoming emancipated at 17. Her first job was at the lower end of the fashion production chain — in a laundromat, putting on zippers and sewing hems.
She also began studying at the University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras, where she first became involved in activism through student protests against the U.S. Navy’s bombing of Vieques, an island municipality in eastern Puerto Rico. The Navy used the island as a bombing training range for 60 years, contaminating the soil, water, and air, possibly contributing to the increased cancer rate in the population.
The protests made her feel a massive disconnect between her studies in fashion and social activism.
“We have this image that fashion is banal,” she said. “Until I realized that Puerto Ricans use their bodies to carry messages of activism, like billboards. That opened up other avenues for me.”
Fashion as social activism
For Ortiz-González, fashion is the reflection of society. That’s why she has spent much of her career studying social movements that used fashion as a tool for empowerment.
For example, the Black Panthers Party’s uniforms, she says, were strategically thought out: black beret, dark leather jacket, turtleneck shirt, and dark sunglasses.
The designer also studied the symbolism in the clothing of the Young Lords, a revolutionary group of Puerto Rican activists who organized for social justice in Chicago during the late 1960s-1970s.
Inspired by activism, Ortiz-González created the collection STRANDED. The designer investigated eight atrocities that the United States committed against Puerto Ricans and created a series of distorted digital images that are beautiful to the eye, but reveal the ugly truth through 3D glasses.
“The idea is to use the space of the runway, which is super privileged, and confront it with another reality,” she said.
Philadelphia as her home
Ortiz-González has been in the U.S.for 12 years, half in Philadelphia. Although she admits that “Philly is home now,” she hopes someday to move back to Puerto Rico.
The designer received an MFA from Savannah College of Art & Design, and has worked as an associate professor and chair of the fashion design department at Moore College of Art & Design, as a professor at Lindenwood University in St. Louis, Missouri, and in Puerto Rico at Universidad del Turabo and Universidad de Artes Plásticas.
Now, in addition to her role as executive director of Taller Puertorriqueño, creating space for the diaspora to create and grow, the designer is developing her brand Nashelia Juliana from a more creatively and artistically free perspective. The company focuses on social justice and has been around for 11 years.
“The island is not alone, and neither is the diaspora,” she said.
