Cosmo Couture & CRB: How Sustainability Transcends the Fashion Landscape | BioBuzz

Cosmo Couture & CRB: How Sustainability Transcends the Fashion Landscape

Clark Richardson & Biskup’s Jarvis Randall and Stephanie Nguyen spoke with BioBuzz about their team’s involvement in Cosmo Couture. Their creative interpretation of this year’s “Out of this World” theme is of euphoric experiences with community, extraordinary progress, and sustainability. A design firm excelling in architecture and engineering, CRB is a multifaceted company built by the people, for the people.

By Cora Karim | October 10, 2024

What comes to mind when you think of Rockville, Maryland? Known as a retail hub with notable infrastructure, it is also home to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), adding to its renown. While it is grounded in scientific endeavors, the question remains: how does it stand out through diversity? Corporations dilute its essence, its personality, though it’s the small businesses proving to be the city’s saving grace.

There is prejudice to the sciences. One thinks of white lab coats and equidistant sterile counters where the most interesting phrase is like white paste and monotonic. They think of grandeur discoveries inside the quiet vacuum of a microscope. However, there is one design company that greatly differentiates from the standard. They are a compendium of creativity, the vastness of our colorful world, utilizing local scrap and turning it into environmentally sustainable art. 

As Jarvis Randall, a Virtual Design & Construction (VDC) project coordinator at Clark Richardson & Biskup (CRB), puts it, “[The world’s a] whole tapestry of colors with the way the leaves are changing from different hues of orange, yellow, greens, reds and browns. That there, in of itself, is a form of inspiration, so [it is] in nature and everything around you”.

A Unique and Creative Approach to Fashion and Sustainability

CRB, an architectural design firm, has several locations within our nation, one of them being in Rockville. I had the pleasure of meeting Jarvis Randall and Stephanie Nguyen, an interior designer with a daring ability to think outwardly in both technically and artistically inclined aspects. 

Their involvement in the International Interior Design Association’s (IIDA) riveting Cosmo Couture adds a uniqueness to this year’s event. The theme is “Out of this World”, a phrase some may use as a hyperbole, or others a speculation of the many cosmic mysteries deep within the nebulous space beyond. CRB’s take on this theme is unconventional yet fitting: a feeling of euphoria. While some may question their interpretation of this theme, emotions themselves are, like the laws of space itself, sometimes inexplicable and interpersonal (or in the case of space, interplanetary). 

Euphoria, like CRB’s creative approach to the fields of both sustainability and design, is reliant on what a community needs. It can be one’s workplace, home, corporation, or even an individual’s human body, a template for any sort of creation.

As Randall said, “It really just depends on [the] state of mind you are in at any given point. What is the design problem that you’re trying to solve, and how can your surroundings help [answer] through inspiration and resolve [those] problems that you are facing from a design standpoint”.

Cosmo Couture is CRB’s euphoria. They’ve created gowns and dresses and entire costumes built out of locally recycled textiles, metals, and materials all together to showcase what the post-modernist fashion world can look like. It’s a sustainable approach to beauty and consolidates the community’s skills, too. 

A Inside Look at the Event (SOURCE: BioBuzz).

Nguyen says, “It could be flooring, ceiling, paint, it could be any building material. So we partner with a building material rep, and the goal is to make a garment out of their materials. [I] think it’s 80% of their materials [used for the show provided by the rep]. I think it’s a good opportunity for CRB being [a lesser] architect company to partner with other people in the design industry to kind of show that we are also an architecture company”.

A People-Focused Perspective

There’s irony in their conversation, them being a small business, because their achievements are extraordinary and, dare I say, out of this world, too. From innovations in gene therapy, pharmaceuticals, and even the miscellaneous involvement for sustainable pet food production, their technical skills and experiences transcend the cookie-cutter space of sterilized environments. 

“I think, with the work that we do, again, it’s very technical,” says Nguyen. “There’s, I think, for the most part, an obvious right or wrong solution. But when it comes to the people spaces, and I see these as [the] open office spaces, things like that, there’s a little bit more creativity there. And so how I kind of translate the two different design worlds is that if you focus on the people or the person [in] the space, experiencing the space, that can lead to a different outlook”. 

In this year’s and 2022’s Cosmo Couture events, one of the design spaces was the person, the human body. It is a space that should be respected just as much as any landscape within our great green home. Our bodies are euphoria personified, and by tailoring each model to a unique perspective on the otherworldly – another pastiche of irony as the theme gravitates to the cosmos, an endless supply of material – by utilizing what is limited and local.

“You have the more clean, sterile, lab/process focus areas where [it’s] gown up and [very] technical,” says Randall, CRB’s model in Cosmo Couture’s 2022 ‘Soiree’ theme. “It’s by the books, FDA codes and compliances and whatnot. And then [there’s], what I would think of, maybe, this softer side of the spaces that Stephanie and others design, and that’s the more people-focus, people-centric areas. Think of [your] office areas, lounge spaces, cafeterias. [The] people who we partner with Cosmo are the vendors that are providing either equipment or textiles, furniture pieces, fabrics, etc, for those spaces. So if you think about, again, the people that you’re designing those spaces for, the vendors who are providing equipment and textiles and [furnishings] for those spaces, and how you want them to feel when you’re in those spaces, going back to the euphoric state, then that can help [draw] the comparison and design a meaningful space for those people who are going to inhabit it. [It] drives the design… So, breaking away from the harsh, sterile ‘everything has to be stainless steel or white’ aspect of those lab spaces, and getting to the more creative, softer, people-centric spaces for the employees who are going to be inhabiting those areas kind of helps drive [euphoria]”.

This euphoria, a word that can surmount anything depending on the individual, is a satisfaction driven by the happiness of others to the CRB team. We as human beings marvel at the sight of a smile, the dimple within a rosy cheek. It’s a euphoric expression. When we cry, scream, dance, love, and create, we experience an infinitum of euphoria. We as human beings are meant to communicate and congregate.

“It’s like 20-something, maybe close to 30-something teams this year. So with that many, you’re bound to find multiple interpretations about this world,” says Randall. “[T]he venue is different this year, [too]. [W]e’re at the National Building Museum, and just how the event, the walk, all of that is going to be intertwined within that space. I think there’s a fountain that the models have to walk around and have that incorporated, [so] just seeing the whole ambiance of how that venue is going to be done up in such a way that it’s so ready”. 

As a community, we can expand ideas into the literal and revel in the glory of what we’ve made to the point that our laughs and cries break through even the quiet spaces of the cosmos. It’s the people, together, that is, currently, an “out-of-this-world” idea… but with Cosmo Couture’s alignment of great thinkers, the euphoria amongst each contestant, each designer, each model is an experience to behold by even those not of our world.