Alumni Notables

Kitchen Wisdom

Alexis deBoschnek,

Fabric Styling ’12, Fashion Merchandising Management ’10, is a problem-solver in the kitchen

Cooking requires creativity. For example, what do you do when you don’t have access to traditional kitchen tools? When you find yourself with a surfeit of wilting herbs? Alexis deBoschnek, culinary influencer and author of the cookbook To the Last Bite, has answers.

Her journey to writing a cookbook was circuitous, but she’s always been obsessed with food. “When I was growing up, my mom would make me these beautiful lunches with marinated peppers, pâté, avocado,” deBoschnek says. She didn’t consider a culinary career until her junior year at FIT, during a trend-forecasting internship. “I was in a meeting, and they were talking about the Pantone color of the year like it was truly life-changing,” she says. “I thought, ‘I can’t do this for the rest of my life.’” Books by the noted food critic and editor Ruth Reichl inspired deBoschnek to complete an International Culinary Center certificate in culinary techniques.

She moved to Los Angeles and landed at BuzzFeed’s cooking site, Tasty, in 2018. She became part of its talent program, which featured both famous chefs and rising digital stars experimenting with content. As part of this job, deBoschnek hosted Tasty’s “Chef Out of Water” video series, during which she had to make full meals using household appliances like irons and coffee makers.

In 2019, deBoschnek went freelance and soon landed a book deal with Simon & Schuster. She describes her recipes as “easy and approachable,” so it makes sense that one of her favorites is rice—albeit zhuzhed with sautéed shallots, white wine, and stock. In To the Last Bite, it’s called “Weeknight Rice,” but her friends call it the rice. DeBoschnek admits that beyond flavor, “I’m thinking about color and texture. That’s the art school coming back,” she says. “Having different textural elements in a meal is so important … something crunchy, something creamy. It needs to be multidimensional.”

Her cookbook is filled with comforting options like a riff on shrimp cocktail, spatchcock chicken, and Creamsicle-esque orange meringue semifreddo. It’s also designed so readers can cook efficiently and reduce waste. Each recipe has footnotes explaining how leftover ingredients like herbs, onion, and buttermilk can be used in other recipes in the book. Prior to its April 2022 release, To the Last Bite received mentions in Thrillist, BookRiot, and TIME.

DeBoschnek still occasionally makes “Chef Out of Water” videos—in a recent episode, she cooked with a wax warmer. This involved nearly six hours of cooking and an entire roll of tin foil for heat retention. And yet, she produced tomato confit, poached tuna, and chocolate bark. “When I’m with these weird tools,” she says, “something clicks and my creativity comes out.” — Vanessa Machir

Mumbai Chic

Riya Khanna, Fashion

Business Management ’20, and Amruta Behera,

Fashion Design ’20, launched a popular streetwear brand midpandemic

Like many of their fellow 2020 grads, Riya Khanna and Amruta Behera, friends who met as roommates in FIT’s Alumni Hall, looked forward to jobs in the fashion industry. Instead, after graduation, they found themselves back home in Mumbai under lockdown.

Khanna and Behera created Rising Among in the most challenging of circumstances.

They made the best of their downtime, producing face masks in cool, reflective fabric. Bolstered by brisk sales, they deconstructed old jeans to make cute denim tops with the pockets intact. “Every item in the resulting zero-waste ‘denimpocket’ line sold out,” Behera says. “We even used selvage as straps.”

Soon their cottage industry grew into a full-fledged streetwear brand: jackets with detachable sleeves, pants that convert to shorts, shirts with buckles and zippers. Their aesthetic is ’90s-era looks in new or upcycled fabrics. “We interpreted styles from New York and juxtaposed them with life in bustling Mumbai,” says Khanna, whose sophisticated, clean silhouettes are enlivened by Behera’s bold use of color. Their customer, Behera says, “is that person who loves to make an impression walking into a room.”

Necessity forced hyperlocal manufacturing: working with Indian craftsmen, resorting to muslin for samples, and later, sourcing fabric from deadstock. They overcame each challenge with ingenuity and persistence.

They called the company RIAM—short for Riya/Amruta — and soon reimagined the name as Rising Among.

Rising Among’s footwear and jewelry line launched this April with metallic “drip rings,” artisan-cast to look as though they’re melting.

Covid’s barrage of testing and quarantines proved “super scary, but we had ‘risen among’ all that to the next stage,” Behera explains.

Recently, Flying Solo, a brand consortium that was helping Rising Among with sales and marketing, invited them to present at its Paris Fashion Week runway show. In March, the duo showcased their latest collection, Untamed. “Our entire journey is encapsulated in this collection: being uncontrollable, standing out rather than fitting in,” Khanna says.

“We started in peak Covid, and that’s how we learned to work,” she adds. “We had delivery and pickup delays, red zones, no shipping to hotspots. Wave after wave, we’d get disappointed, but it never kept us from working. Now, even if there are another 500 Covid waves, it won’t stop Rising Among.” — Winnie McCroy

The Victory Is You

Fulya Turkmenoglu,

Fashion Design ’14, expanded her medical device brand to PPE

It was spring 2020, and Fulya Turkmenoglu needed to pivot fast. The previous year, the entrepreneur launched her medical device brand, Jaiyou, featuring a line of attractively designed, FDA-approved sports medicine supports and braces. Then the pandemic hit. “I started getting emails: ‘Do you have masks? Do you have surgical gowns?’” Turkmenoglu got to work. The daughter of a doctor, she grasped the importance of reliable personal protective equipment (PPE), which was in urgently short supply. “We had so many examples in the marketplace that were made of fabric not designed for medical products—for furniture covering, for example,” she says. There were alarming reports of pathogen-laden gowns, and masks containing fiberglass and other hazardous substances. “I couldn’t imagine my father wearing something contaminated. That’s insane,” Turkmenoglu says. “I thought, ‘Why don’t we do it in the proper way?’”

This meant securing FDA approval for her new PPE line, Jaiyou Medical Essentials, which includes surgical gowns and both adult and pediatric masks. All products are made in Turkmenoglu’s native country, Turkey. “PPE is not a simple textile item. It’s a medical device that must be manufactured in a medicalproduct manufacturing facility with cleanroom protocol,” she says. “For our PPE, we use medical-grade, nonwoven fabric that is breathable, flexible, lightweight, noncombustible, and fluid resistant. It decomposes easily and is nontoxic, nonirritating, environmentally friendly, and recyclable. We don’t work with thirdparty supply chains, which means taking responsibility for the entire sourcing, manufacturing, and sterilization practices.”

Having successfully launched both a sports medicine and a PPE line on her own, Turkmenoglu envisions vast possibilities for her company’s expansion. “You could call it a small business, but I consider it a startup.” At-home Covid-19 tests are in the works. She also sees potential in prosthetics and in apparel designed for people with disabilities.

Jaiyou is a multifaceted company, and its name carries an apt double meaning. In Mandarin, it’s a cheer to support athletes: “fuel it and go!” While attending yoga classes, Turkmenoglu observed that sessions often concluded with the Sanskrit word jai, meaning “victory.” She recalls thinking, jai-you, the victory is you.

“The idea is supporting your body so you can exceed your own limits. We must protect and support our doctors and nurses with a high level of safety so they can take care better.” —Nora Maynard

TOP: Fulya Turkmenoglu. ABOVE: The Jaiyou brand is manufactured with the highest standards.

Like Mother, Like Daughter

Joan Nielsen McNamara,

Apparel Design ’51, and Barbara McNamara,

Fashion Buying and Merchandising ’92

“W hen FIT handed out internships, my friends were sent to a glove factory in Brooklyn that had rats, but I was very lucky,” Joan McNamara recalls. She helped a designer— an heir to the Gillette razor fortune—construct the garments he made for celebrity game show panelists like Dorothy Kilgallen and Arlene Francis.

“He had wonderful ideas about design but didn’t know how to sew,” she says. “He made a blouse with a boat-shaped neckline for Arlene Francis, but he didn’t put any elastic around

TOP: A gown Joan designed —and wore—at FIT. ABOVE: Joan and Barbara in Santa Monica, California. the shoulders. It started falling off in the middle of the show.”

After graduation, Joan took a job working for the actress Gloria Swanson, who had designed the costumes for a play she was in called Nina. Joan constructed them in Swanson’s Fifth Avenue garment workshop.

“I learned all about her personal life,” Joan says. “She only ate broccoli. She was very upset with her daughter because she had fallen in love with a Frenchman almost double her age, and she wanted her secretary to break up the relationship. The daughter ended up marrying this fellow— and as far as I know, they’re still married today.”

After a year, Joan left the industry, got married, and had five girls and four boys. She made all her daughters’ clothes. Her youngest, Barbara, always loved fashion.

“She was always fussy about clothes,” Joan recalls. “She wouldn’t wear pajamas unless the tops and bottoms matched.”

Barbara McNamara followed in Joan’s footsteps to FIT. “My mother has timeless taste, and we always loved going shopping together,” she says. “From when I was a young girl, FIT was the only place I wanted to go.”

In the early aughts, Barbara left the fashion industry for a job casting background roles for Sex and the City.

“Background casting has a lot to do with fashion,” Barbara

RIGHT: Goldberg in his studio with Hue’s burger behind him.

says. “You work very closely with the wardrobe department to find people who look right for a scene, whether it takes place at Barneys or in Brooklyn with hipsters.”

A few years later, she started her own background casting company and worked on The Devil Wears Prada and 30 Rock. Recently, she’s gotten into principal casting—speaking roles—for History Channel miniseries, and in 2021 she was accepted into the exclusive Casting Society of America.

“I was on my own for all those years,” she says. “Now I’m part of a group.” — Jonathan Vatner

You Gonna Eat That?

Food photography by Joel Goldberg,

Advertising and Marketing Communications, makes everything look delicious

The two big, beautiful burgers in this issue were photographed in the Brooklyn studio of Joel Goldberg, who specializes in food, product, and still life imagery. An Advertising and Marketing Communications alum, he was always a photography hobbyist, but found his calling in the food industry and decided to turn a creative outlet into a career. He now shoots for a variety of brands and publications, including Magnolia Bakery, The New York Times, Food Network Magazine, and more.

With this kind of photography, details are everything—designed, Goldberg says, to “evoke desire.” Consider our burger (on page 3): Red dab of ketchup against golden cheese, crisp ruffle of lettuce, perfect shadow on the bun. And a small but tasty touch: salt crystals sparkling on the fries.

The internet might tell you food photographers use motor oil in place of pancake syrup and Elmer’s glue on cereal instead of milk. Usually not true, Goldberg says. “We often eat the food we shoot. It doesn’t go to waste.”

Unlike many in his profession, he likes the food in his images slightly asymmetrical, a little imperfect: “That makes you really want to eat it.” In his photos, he says, “The most important thing isn’t my camera or my lens. It’s the light—how harsh or soft, the color temperature.” He prefers “directional” light, from the side or slightly from behind, unusual in food photos. He thinks it makes his images distinctive. “If something you’re doing is working,” he advises young photographers, “keep doing it.”

His secret weapon is a great team of collaborators: a food stylist, prop stylist, creative director or art director, and all their various assistants. But for the Hue shoot, he worked alone. And as the client, we got to order our ideal burger. Want fries with that? Of course. Tomato? Sure. “And the Coke…” Goldberg said, “fizz or no fizz?” Fizz, definitely. — Linda Angrilli