By David Menconi
Victoria Adesanmi ’13 works in the shoe business for Adidas, helping to craft new and fashionable lines of running footwear. Given that, you might think that she’s an avid runner herself, right?
“Actually,” she confesses with a sheepish laugh, “I’m not a runner at all. But it’s been my way to get a foot in the door. And it got me to where I am now, working on the fashion design side, where comfort and aesthetics are number one.”
Adesanmi is a color material designer at Adidas, where she builds palettes of color and material for new shoe designs. Among her projects are custom lines for a number of celebrity artists so big that she’s not allowed to talk about or even identify them.
It’s fitting that Adesanmi, who lives in Los Angeles, Calif., took an indirect route into fashion design. A Maryland native, she grew up in a traditional Nigerian family with a deep and abiding Christian faith. Her parents wanted her to pursue a practical career in the sciences while she wanted to be an artist, so coming to NC State to study industrial design was a way to compromise.
After graduation, Adesanmi wound up in New York designing sunglasses, only to find the job unsatisfying. Networking and further studies at the Fashion Institution of Technology and Pensole Design Academy opened up options, and she landed with Adidas in 2015. She’s had a good run there, but Adesanmi’s career plan includes starting her own design studio to do a broader range of design work.
“I feel I am a vessel of God’s creativity,” she says. “So the work is like partnering with God, which involves a lot of praying and reading the word. That’s how I begin to design. Before accepting a project, I’ll pray on it because for me designing is an act of service. ‘Hey, God, whose life can I touch with this? How can I make it serve you?’”
