Fashionably Award

  KEITH ENRIQUEZ/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Fourth-year
Laneia Moore has a new line of loungewear featured
in Fred Segal. All proceeds will benefit AIDS clinics in
Africa.

By Barbara McGuire
Daily Bruin Senior Staff

Laneia Moore is proof that a student’s major doesn’t
always need to correlate with her future endeavors.

An African American studies student, Moore doesn’t plan on
finding a job related to this field after graduating in June.
Instead, she’s planning on going into fashion design.

“They’re not anyhow or anywhere related, but there
is something about the environment of college that always makes you
look for some sort of alternative to the status quo,” Moore
said. “I don’t want to get a job; I want to do
something else.”

Moore has already started working on her dream of becoming a
fashion designer with her “FantasyGirl” line of
loungewear that can be found starting today at the retail store
Fred Segal in Santa Monica. Two other trendy boutiques, Buffalo
Exchange in Los Angeles and Blonde in Santa Monica, are also
currently carrying unique pieces of Moore’s loungewear
line.

Wonnie Park, a buyer for Fred Segal, said she selected
Moore’s loungewear line because it was innovative and fresh
““ something hard to come by in a fashion world currently
dominated by reproduction. The collection consists of matching sets
of tees and hot pants decorated with paints and jewels.

“It’s for the girl who wants to be sexy all the
time,” Park said. “It’s a hybrid between a bikini
outfit and an old T-shirt … and it’s for a very particular
kind of customer, but that’s what makes it good and
unique.”

In addition to the unique style of “FantasyGirl,” it
also has an underlying charitable purpose. A portion of the
proceeds from the sale of the loungewear pieces will go to the Aid
to Africa Project, a non-profit organization Moore started about a
year ago, after seeing a startling “Newsweek” cover
featuring a photo of an orphan from Africa.

“The face of this child was helpless, innocent, and the
title said “˜10 Million Orphans,'” Moore said.
“It was really shocking to me that 10 million children are
orphans without moms and dads … because it was such a serious
pandemic of such serious proportions that that day I decided to do
something.”

Moore said she called up her friend Dr. Tarik Allen, a UCLA
alumnus of both the undergraduate and law school, to see if he
would be interested in helping her find some type of organization
which could provide aid to the struggling orphanages in Africa.
Allen, who is now a board member of the Aid to Africa Project, said
he was interested in the project from the get-go because he had
seen the lack of funding problems face to face while studying
abroad in South Africa.

“When she told me about this, it just really sparked my
thoughts as far as what we could do for the orphans and children of
Africa, where there are just so many people that are diagnosed with
AIDS,” Allen said in a phone interview from his home in
Northern California.

Moore said the Aid to Africa Project is currently working on
mobilizing its resources. They are finding sponsors and raising
capital to send to charity organizations in Africa that will use
the money for things such as paying the salary of nurses and
doctors. Moore said many might have seen her on Bruin Walk, where
she often sits holding up a sign promoting her project.

“Our end goal is to make an impact on the ground itself,
but in essence, that takes time and it also takes a certain amount
of money,” Allen said. “Your goal is always to help
somebody help themselves. We hope to change the atmosphere on the
ground and give people more hope of an opportunity to
survive.”

Moore said although the UCLA community isn’t currently
involved in the organization, she hopes to get support from it down
the line. She plans on having a fashion show where pieces from the
loungewear line with celebrity signatures will be auctioned off,
with all of the proceeds benefiting the Aid to Africa Project.

Though Moore admits to the lack of congruency between her major
and career choice; she believes that just being a Bruin has
affected her life in innumerable ways and helped her in reaching
her goals.

“There is something in the environment here that breeds
socially conscious, aware, innovative kinds of people, and
it’s built into our university system,” Moore said.

“It makes me look at the world a lot differently than if I
hadn’t had the same sort of education,” she continued.
“It helps me not to be scared too. Something about this
university breeds this sort of fearlessness, and you’re just
not afraid to take a chance.”