And then, with talent and luck, comes the glamour.
For local fashion design student Megan Stein, her well-conceived and beautiful creation garnered international recogntion in Paris. In December, the Bala Cynwyd native and 1996 graduate of Lower Merion High School became the first American ever to win the International Competition for Young Fashion Designers. Stein defeated students from 17 other countries, securing a one-year scholarship to the prestigious Chambre Syndicale de la Couture in Paris.
Now in its 24th year, Concours International des Jeunes Createurs de Mode is among the most prestigious student contests in the world. Not only does the first prize winner earn the coveted couture house scholarship, but he or she gets a round-trip airline ticket, 3,000 euros, and a state-of-the art embroidery and sewing machine.
But despite the prestige that goes along with winning such an esteemed prize - and having it judged by fashion icon Pierre Cardin -- Stein has not had time to rest. With graduation looming from Drexel University, where she will earn a master's degree in fashion design, Stein is spending most of her time preparing for the school's fashion show in May.
"Drexel's fashion show is like the culmination of our degree [for the seniors and graduate students]," said Stein. "Everyone has to make a collection of between four and six outfits...
"It's a professional show -- it's professionally produced," added Stein. "We have real models, music, lighting, and we use the Crystal Tea Room at the Wanamaker Building ... It's a beautiful show."
But it is also the product of hundreds of hours of work: From the earliest sketches of the outfits to the procuring of the fabrics to the sewing of the last hems and buttons, everything is carefully thought out and considered. According to Drexel University Professor Renée Weiss Chase, Stein "has a strong drive for perfection."
"She wants everything that she does to be impeccably and perfectly done," said Chase. "And she has a great capacity to just work, work, work until she reaches that place where she's satisfied with her work."
Because of the nature of Stein's collection, the detail work is key.
"I'm doing this collection right now themed on ancient Mayan civilization," Stein said. "I started thinking about it last year...The Mayan apocalypse is supposedly coming up in 2012, and those sort of things are always interesting to me. So I started actually researching the culture and their mythology and rituals and their time-cycle theories ... And all of this is so rich visually."
This, of course, runs counter to most people's conceptions of fashion. For in the popular imagination, high-fashion design is built on nothing more than the creation of beautiful objects. But to accomplished designers like Stein, fashion is just as much a product of intellect as it is of emotions.
"She...is very interested in having her clothes be wearable," Professor Weiss Chase said. "So she's not making clothes that are costumes. She's making clothes that are intricate and highly detailed and full of wonderful shape and proportion, but at the root of her designs is this need to make them be wearable and envied by women."
      The doors of Stein's closet in the studio at Drexel are covered with photos and other images that inspire her. Aside from the fashion photos that one might expect to be there, she has also tacked up detailed pictures of Mayan carved stone, the patterns of which are loosely but clearly echoed in a silk brocade she is working with for one of the items that will appear in the fashion show.
      In that sense, the Mayan inspiration for Stein's collection is more than a jumping-off point for her designs. It is, in fact, inextricably tied to the clothing itself.
      The Mayans "did a lot of self-mutilation for rituals," Stein said, pulling a deep brown leather jacket from her closet and laying it on the work table. There are several stylized slashes along the torso, each of which reveals a blood-red fabric beneath. "So I'm kind of picking up on this theme of the body and piercing and kind of this ancient feeling."
      The jacket perfectly combines the sort of violence of the aspects of Mayan culture she was inspired by, but at the same time is a thoroughly modern and highly wearable garment. There is, indeed, a real beauty to it. And it seems as if its appeal is the result of both its intellectual and historical inspiration as well as the technical facility Stein has brought to bear on every aspect of its construction. She has even been dying her own textiles for many of the garments in her collection.
      All of this work, of course, comes at a cost: The effort required, and the time consumed, is tremendous.
      "I probably went through about four or five muslins, or fit garments, before I actually cut the leather," she said. "So you have to wait until the model comes and fit it on her and fix everything and make it all perfect before you actually commit to fabric [or leather]."
      And with leather, the need for perfection is even greater than it is with cloth, because "the needle actually punches holes in it while you're sewing and they never go away," she said.
      But in the hands of Megan Stein, even a risky undertaking like working with leather for one of the key pieces in her collection turns out well. She simply seems to have a knack for creating beautiful garments, no matter what the inspiration or how difficult the demands of the process are.
Her winning item in the Paris competition was a leather jacket that fastened around the body with a seatbelt and that featured clip-on pockets. And as counter to common conceptions of fashion as that might be, Stein managed to make it both a beautiful piece of clothing and, in a very real way, wearable high art. Such is the nature of her talent that she can create, even out of the unimaginable, an object of desire.
Regardless of all the accolades she has garnered in recent months, she has but one goal in mind right now: To finish her collection for the Drexel fashion show. "And then after that, I'll collapse for a couple of weeks and sleep," she said with a laugh.
When she finally recovers, well-rested and ready to design again, the Paris fashion world awaits. No one doubts that she'll be a star there, too.