She’s completing an unconventional project right now, working with nothing but clothes bought at Goodwill. She was well prepared for it by an earlier project that involved a dress made of toilet tissue.

And she took an unconventional road to get where she is today, a 2014 A&T graduate on the verge of launching her own line.  The initial pieces are in production now for a fall debut. But first comes a show in February, Goodwill’s annual “Rock the Runway.”

“This is the second show they’ve had where they’ve taken designers who are not styling garments, meaning putting random items together to make a new look,” Doran says. “We’re actually recrafting, which means we’re taking things that are in the stores, cutting them up and reconstructing them into something completely different.”

She could easily have passed on the show last spring when Goodwill was seeking designers. She was putting her own line together for the first time and also preparing for the first Greensboro Fashion Week in September.

Still, she put her name in. Her reputation preceded her (“They saw the tissue dress!”). In April she got the word that she was selected as one of the seven designers who made the cut.

With a $250 gift card in hand, Doran hit the local Goodwill stores. One of her best finds was a set of orange silk-look curtains made of shantung. Where others saw curtains, Doran saw the classic silhouette of a full-length gown suitable for the red carpet.

Each designer has chosen a theme for their work. Doran’s is “Harlem Nights,” a chic look inspired by the culture of the Harlem Renaissance.

“You think of the swanky night spots and the blues and jive and all these different cultural pieces of Harlem nightlife, kind of brought forward a little bit,” she says. “You may not see too many pearls and feathers, but the same glitz and glam.”

The show is Thursday, Feb 20, at the Elm Street Center in downtown Greensboro. All seven designers each have posted four of their pieces on the event’s blog.  Voting is now open on the show’s website to let visitors help select the winner.

Most of Doran’s pieces will be for women, but two will be designed for kids or teenagers. “My son is actually part of the show,” she says. You can find him on her Rock the Runway blog. He’s the classy little guy in a sharp blue ascot and satin jacket, made of what once were bridesmaid dresses. And, yes, he’s “smizing” (smiling with his eyes).

This isn’t the first time Doran has put models on the runway wrapped in unconventional materials.

“I did the Earth Day fashion show about two years ago at A&T, and I chose to do a toilet-tissue dress,” she recalls. Innovation in fashion may always involve a degree of risk, but the risk that time was special: The show was being held outdoors. “Thank God it was a sunny day.”

Once Doran has rocked Goodwill’s runway, her focus will turn to her line’s debut this fall. It will be shown for the first time at Greensboro Fashion Week 2015, the week of September 9.  It will be available for sale online.

The path to that debut has been long and, perhaps needless to say, unconventional. Doran has wanted to be a designer since she was six years old. Her earliest work involved turning little white “church socks” into dresses for Barbie dolls.

She came to A&T as a nontraditional adult student, having previously attended two different schools in her home state of New York.

“This has been a degree years in the making,” she says. But she did make it through A&T’s fashion merchandising and design program in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences. Now she’s going for her master’s in consumer, apparel, and retail studies at UNC Greensboro.

“There’s a fine line between what you want to do and what you need to do, especially when you’re raising a family,” she says.  She learned that lesson from her own mother, a single mom until Doran was 14 years old.

“I saw her put her dreams and the things she wanted to do on the side, to go and get a nine-to-five. And I loved her for it. We were taken care of, but she never picked it back up. So as I got older in pursuing what I wanted to do in design and in beginning to have a family of my own, I said, ‘I’m not letting go of this.’”

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