About

Bachelors in Apparel Design and Bachelors in Computer Science.

How I Got Here

I grew up watching my mom run her own painting business in Bozeman. Estimates, scheduling, color theory, client management, all of it. Watching her do both halves is where I stopped thinking of design and operations as separate skills.

I went to the University of Minnesota for fashion design, and pattern making was the part I loved. Looking at flat fabric and knowing how it has to be cut and folded to fit a body came naturally to me. I was good at sewing and construction, and obsessed with how clothes communicate: why something reads as expensive before you touch it, how a silhouette signals a decade.

My senior thesis collection focused on world building. I designed the garments, styled the shoot, and made the poster.

I shot and printed this series in 2024, a couple of years after I finished at Minnesota. Black and white, one prop per portrait, and a lot of standing in a darkroom waiting for something to come up.

Eight black-and-white prints spread across a cutting mat, mid-edit. Styled portraits, each built around a prop: a bottle poured over the head, a burger eaten in front of an ice house sign, a crab held in both hands, someone lying back beside a guitar, a sandwich held up against power lines, a figure obscured by pale balloon forms, a portrait in front of a lit shop cooler, and a fork held up against the eye. — a rough cut — eight prints down on the mat, still working out which ones make the set.

After I graduated I traveled alone through Europe for a while. I ended up in hostels full of founders and developers, people building things I'd never heard of with tools I didn't understand. I came back to Montana and enrolled in a CS degree at Montana State. I wanted to understand what they were doing.

Fashion trained me to read a room, and code taught me to read a system. I lean on both every week.

Outside of Work

I DJ occasionally around Bozeman, mostly friends' parties and small venues. Playlists are the thing I'm most particular about: how one song earns the next one, what the arc of a two-hour set should feel like. I go to as many concerts as I can.

Both hands over the mixer section of a Pioneer DDJ-400 controller mid-set, rings on several fingers, lit hot magenta with a sparkling light curtain behind. — small rooms, long sets.

Playing a set on a small stage, two moving-head spotlights cutting through haze. A Pioneer DJ controller on the table, string lights scattered across the stage floor, and the silhouette of someone in the crowd in the foreground. — small rooms, long sets.

I'm also endlessly interested in how trends work, in music and tech as much as in fashion. Every one of them has an origin and a logic you can trace back.

What I'm Looking For

I'm drawn to teams where design and engineering aren't two separate conversations. Where someone can say "this component is doing too much" and mean it as a code problem and a design problem at once.

I move between disciplines rather than specializing in one, and each one has ended up feeding the next.

I want to stay an individual contributor. I'm best with my hands on the work: in the prompts, in the code, in the data, opening pull requests every week instead of reviewing other people's. I'd take a team where that's the whole job over a title that moves me away from it.

If something I've made caught your attention, or you just want to talk, you can reach me at sageajames1@gmail.com.