Crazy. Beautiful.

Last week I found myself interviewing the youngest, brightest, up-and-coming fashion designers at SCAD for my day job and since then, I've been thinking a lot about what separates the creative geniuses from the genuine crazies. As a huge fan of Dexter, I'm fascinated by those people on the brink. You know the ones. The serial killers. The fashion designers. The artists living in their heads. You’ve probably met one or two of these truly unusual birds who are so creative/demented you know they’re destined for fame/jail. But where is the line?

As I scoped out all the ingenuious threads crafted by these 21 and 22 year olds (none of whom, mind you, are crazy or murderous), there was no doubting the talent. They were the best of the best at one of the country’s best design schools, but when I flipped through their portfolios— many of which were pasted with images of corpses, grotesque disfigurations and guts—all I could think about was Silence of the Lambs... not Project Runway. And the funny thing is, those demented journals of those twisted minds produced some of the most interesting (and lovely) clothing I’ve ever seen. There must be a switch somewhere, that separates the Stephen Kings from the Jack the Rippers, all I know is that their thoughts are leagues deeper than my own, and that I'm endlessly interested in examining that difference.