Cara Benevenia pilots luxury handbags
Former Marist Fashion pioneer uses her senior thesis to inspire new line
A hot pink, 1980s-Prince inspired, hand-woven textile left its mark on the Silver Needle Runway in 2017. Cara Benevenia ‘17 has revived its recent legacy in her new luxury handbag line — sporting the same textile that kickstarted her design career as a Marist fashion design student.
“Seeing that everything Prince stood for were things that I personally struggled with in college, just being who you are or to do something that is different and that no one has done before,” Benevenia said. She left the 31st annual Marist fashion show with the award for Best Collection and inspiration for the rest of her career.
“So many people were like, ‘I need that jacket, I need that dress,’” Benevenia said. “But you can’t mass produce the labor for those. It was really the textile that I was so passionate about and that I wanted to bring to the market.”
Cara Benevenia leather, luxury handbags. Benevenia won Best Collection in the Marist Fashion SNR 31 in 2017. Credit: Cara Benevenia
Now, instead of using yarn from the Michael’s in Poughkeepsie to weave a dress, she is using imported Italian leather.
It’s a small leather goods factory that helps her be a hands-on participant in the process. Her great-grandfather was an artisan and her great-grandmother worked in a corset factory, so she holds the craft close to her heart. “Every single step of the bag is done by hand,” Benevenia said. “That is something I wanted to bring in a circle from where my family roots started.”
Having her roots in clothing design, Benevenia was not versed in handbag design. But after a few prototype rounds, leather fairs and decision-making, ‘Cara Benevenia, LLC’ officially launched. She was recently inducted into the Female Founder Collective — an initiative by Rebecca Mikoff to bring together female founders — for her work with her own brand.
Benevenia’s fashion design journey began on pajama day in grade school — when one of her classmates came in with pajama pants that she stitched herself.
“I just couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that she made clothing,” Benevenia said. “So I started taking sewing classes at this local sewing school, and I kind of had this natural affinity for it.”
“It was really the textile that I was so passionate about and that I wanted to bring to the market.”
For Benevenia, fashion design was mathematical. As a member of her high school’s physics team, her initial success in the craft began with fitting and construction rather than the creative process.
“Being so precise and making clothes fit — I could just do it with my eyes closed,” Benevenia said. “I could look at the book and it could tell me how to draft a pair of pants, I can do it one time and it would fit the model like a glove.”
That being said, it was not always natural — or easy. “I had this struggle with actually designing,” she said.
She visited Marist in high school when she first started thinking about design school, and quickly realized that the creative process was a major part of the curriculum. “That was something I never did, I never had that artistic hand to illustrate. I always felt so insecure in drawing class freshman year, these girls could draw these gorgeous models,” she said.
She began taking summer classes at the Fashion Institute of Technology over the summer to bridge that gap — but throughout her experience, some of her struggles persisted.
Benevenia reflected on the lessons the Marist fashion program lent her design career. “It’s tough because your work is never done,” she said. “Ambitious girls, we bite more than we can chew and you try to make something extravagant and you can’t finish it.”
Benevenia debated withdrawing from the design program during her senior year after struggling with finding a collection idea that resonated with the Marist fashion panel during the first week of the fall semester.
Cara Benevenia was recently inducted in the Female Founder Collective. Benevenia won Best Collection in the Marist Fashion SNR 31 in 2017. Credit: Cara Benevenia
“When [Radley Cramer] gave me my award, he said, ‘Cara came to me at the beginning of the year and said I don’t think I have what it takes to be a great designer,’ and he said, ‘I think you do,’ which I thought was a sweet moment,” she said. “I went from bawling in his office.”
And it wasn’t until January where Benevenia reached a turning point that crafted the blue and pink hues and textures that painted her iconic senior collection. “Seeing the girls on the runway, I was just so happy and just knowing where I started on that first day, feeling so lost,” she said.
After receiving advice from Marist professors and award-winning designer Francesca Liberatore during her senior year, Benevenia knew she had to play to her strengths. “I had professors who actually cared about me and really wanted to push me,” she said.
When Liberatore came to her portfolio class senior year, Benevenia was lost, and she asked for help. “She was like, ‘Okay, but when you have such a small collection you have to make every single look different.’ That was the turning point for me that made sense, and I was able to take that textile that I was so passionate about and make every look different.”
Now, in building her own brand, Benevenia drew from her experiences in working for a socially-conscious beachwear designer, Pondichérie. “Working there gave me so much faith in the fact that I could do it too,” she said.
She also spent some time working in mass market, designing for brands like TJ Maxx and Marshalls, and felt largely unfilled. “It was not the fashion that you think of,” she said.
At Zac Posen House of Z, she dressed Brooke Shields for the Met Gala and did a fitting with Nina Dobrev. While working for him, she realized that her experiences had prepared her to leave and pursue her own design brand.
Throughout her career, she reached many creative ruts. “I was working weekends, I was really run down,” she said. “I was kind of hitting a really low point — and looking back, it is because I wasn’t fulfilling that creative part of me. Every day at Zac, I knew what to expect.”
Benevenia spent time working on her mental and physical health when re-delving into the creative process. She traded jam-packed days of celebrity fittings for drafting her initial designs for her handbag collection.
She is also currently interning in Public Relations at luxury lingerie brand, Kiki de Montparnasse in order to learn how to use the skills for her own brand.
Benevenia has also utilize the Marist fashion network to recruit talented individuals to advance her brand voice.
“It’s been an honor to watch her dream come to fruition,” said Gina Mellish ‘20, a Cara Benevenia social media and branding intern. “She is such a passionate, talented and creative designer and I have learned so much about the industry from her.”
“I knew I was the only one who could make my dream happen,” Benevenia said.