Long before Samantha Jean Moore was creating couture from discarded materials, she and her sister were given the fabric scraps from their mother’s sewing room floor. They cut the pieces into shapes and made pictures of themselves. Her mother, a seamstress, could turn those scraps into something useful, and Samantha grew up with the assumption that making anything was possible. She watched her mother transform fabric into Halloween costumes, prom dresses, and whatever else the family needed. “If I could dream it, she could sew it.”
Samantha comes from a fourth-generation family of seamstresses. “When you don’t have anything to waste, you have to make every single thing count: every egg, every grain of rice, every hand-me-down or yard sale find,” she says. “Everything can have a new life if you give it enough time and attention.”
Her mother was also the person who made Samantha believe that an idea could become a physical thing. “I trusted in my mother’s abilities and pushed her beyond her own limitations because I didn’t see them.” And so, what had begun as a way to save money became the foundation of her design career…