Five Design Alumni Make Their Marks in Fashion and Footwear
03/01/2025
To follow the crisscrossing paths of five UML alumni friends working in the apparel and footwear industries, it would help to have an evidence board—the kind you see in detective movies with strings connecting various photos.
At the center of the board would be the Graphic Design Department in the College of Fine Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences—the place where Jennifer Vivier ’18, Eli Portuhondo ’18, Reggie Blanchard ’19, Adam Gill ’19 and Marcello Lewis ’20 all met.
“We spent time together in classes and studio spaces. We did homework together and learned from each other,” says Vivier, a Lowell native who is now a channel marketing manager for Saucony shoes in Boston. “We were different ages and from different backgrounds, but connecting with each other was so valuable. It made me feel part of this community.”
Portuhondo started the industry connec- tions when he landed a design apprenticeship at Reebok in Boston after graduating. A year later, Blanchard, his former college roommate, got the same postgrad apprenticeship.
“That’s how everything clicked for me and led me to the path I’m on now,” says Blanchard, a native of Bedford, Massachusetts, who then joined Portuhondo at Puma in Boston as a graphic designer for basketball apparel. Portuhondo is still at Puma, and Lewis also was there during his senior year as an intern and freelancer.
In 2021, Lewis, Blanchard and Gill all moved to New York City. Lewis became a designer at Overtime, a sports media company and lifestyle brand, while Blanchard and Gill took jobs at American Eagle.
Blanchard joined Lewis at Overtime a year later and is still there as an apparel graphic designer; Lewis is now a graphic designer of women’s lifestyle apparel at Nike in Oregon; and Gill recently became an associate designer at J.Crew in New York.
“There are just so many overlaps,” says Vivier, who met up with Blanchard and Gill when she was in New York last summer to run a Saucony pop-up event for a collaboration with rapper/designer Jae Tips and the Billionaire Boys Club, a fashion label owned by musician Pharrell Williams.
Vivier credits Portuhondo for teaching her about streetwear culture while at UML.
“We had these creative conversations in school about brands and artists and musicians, which helped shape me into being able to hold my own in this industry,” she says.
Blanchard and Gill both love living in fash- ion-rich New York, where they’ll occasionally see someone on the subway or walking down the street wearing something they designed.
“It’s cool to see stuff that I’ve been part of in the wild,” says Gill, who peruses the city’s myriad clothing stores in his free time—not so much to buy stuff, but for design inspiration.
“My personal style has definitely evolved much more quickly than it would have if I’d stayed in Massachusetts,” says Gill, who grew up in Marlborough. “The second you step out of your house in New York, you know if it’s a good fit or if it’s kind of mediocre—not because other people are wearing good stuff, which they are, but it’s just something in the air.”
While he’s always enjoyed expressing himself with the clothes he wears, Gill didn’t consider working in the fashion industry until his senior year at UML, when that circle of friends in graphic design “showed me how to do it in a way that I didn’t even realize was possible.”
During the pandemic, Gill learned how to screen-print and set up a shop in his dad’s basement. For his senior capstone project, he developed a clothing brand, complete with a logo, graphics and Instagram page—work that helped him land the job at American Eagle.
Blanchard would eventually like to start his own business and is pursuing an associate degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) in New York. After having a “Marie Kondo moment” last summer and donating five bags of clothes, he wrote his FIT application essay on letting go of a Stüssy shirt that was “the first expensive thing I bought, when I was 16 years old.”
“I’m very much of the Carrie Bradshaw, ‘Sex in the City’ energy, where I find a true emotional attachment to garments. It’s really weird,” he says.
One reason Blanchard is “obsessed” with the fashion industry is because it evolves while remaining referential to the past.
“The ability to reference something that happened 50 years ago, and make it contemporary with a cultural impact, makes it so attractive,” he says. “It allows you to be a designer as much as an artist.”