When Julia discovered her grandmother’s sketches of classic fashion gowns in January 2021, she was determined to bring the forgotten designs to life. Her grandmother, Georgie, had designed these when she was a teenager and attended fashion school in the 1940s.
However, she dropped out before completing her studies to care for ailing family members, putting her fashion designer dreams on hold indefinitely.
Despite having never sewn anything before, Julia was determined to fulfill her grandmother’s old designer dreams. She turned to YouTube tutorials to teach herself basic sewing skills and made her grandmother’s designs mostly out of old scraps of fabric left over from her grandmother’s own collection of vintage fabrics.
Julia recorded her grandmother’s reactions to the finished products, and videos of her showing the gowns to Georgie continue to go viral, garnering hundreds of thousands of views per video.
Julia believes her TikTok series has received so much attention from viewers due to the strong bond she has with her grandmother, which viewers have enjoyed watching play out on camera. “It’s a beautiful bonding experience between us that has made Grandma happy,” she explained.
Georgie herself was thrilled upon learning that many people on TikTok have viewed her designs. She occasionally prints out positive comments for Georgie to read because her grandmother is not the most adept at using social media herself.
Julia hopes that people will gain a key takeaway from watching her series, which is that “the older generation is so similar to us in many ways.
They all had dreams and hopes that weren’t all that different from ours.” By sharing her appreciation for her grandmother with others, Julia hopes to inspire others to appreciate their own loved ones.
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