This year, we launched our first-ever Legacy Design Program, featuring five talented HBCU student fashion designers. The program was created to give emerging designers hands-on industry experience through professional workshops, one-on-one mentorship with LHP’s creative team, and a design competition challenging each student to reimagine and upcycle existing LHP HBCU apparel into an original creation.

Meet the first HBCU student-designers to be selected into our Legacy Design Program!

Omowura Adedayo is a third-year Fine Arts major and Honors student at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. His work explores African culture and identity through surreal, large-scale mixed-media paintings. His artwork has been exhibited at institutions including the University of Florida, Florida Atlantic University, and the Orlando Museum of Art, earning him numerous awards and honors.

In 2025, Omowura won the FAMU Homecoming Fashion Show, where he designed nine looks inspired by Black disco fashion. Looking ahead, he plans to continue bridging his practices in fine art and fashion, using both as mediums to explore culture, identity, and storytelling.

Jayla McCallum is a Chicago-born creative and Fashion Design major at Clark Atlanta University. At 20 years old, she has built more than seven years of experience across various art forms, including fashion design, creative direction, styling, garment construction, drawing, and modeling.

Her passion lies in creating change through creative expression, using art as a tool to tell stories, challenge perspectives, and shape culture. Growing up on the West Side of Chicago, Jayla witnessed how many young artists were overlooked or discouraged from pursuing creative paths simply because those careers were not always viewed as practical or accessible. Those experiences helped shape her purpose as a designer.

Jayla’s work is rooted in the belief that art should never be dismissed or undervalued, but recognized as a meaningful pathway to opportunity, self-expression, and cultural impact. Through her work, she is committed to challenging the stigma surrounding creative careers while advocating for greater access, representation, and investment in the arts.

Collin Semien is a current senior, fashion student, at North Carolina A&T who approaches design as both practice and philosophy. Each piece is an exploration of construction, proportion, and purpose, grounded in wearability while pushing subtle boundaries. His sewing journey began long before it became a brand. In high school, khaki uniform pants became his experiment, taken apart and altered while watching his grandmother teach him and his sister the fundamentals of the craft. What started as an observation turned into instinct. Soon, all his pants would be tailored late at night and in the day worn with pride.

Before college, Semien purchased his first sewing machine with the mission of becoming a campus tailor. Encouraged by friends, what began as personal experimentation quickly evolved into custom work, and SEMI-stitched was born in his dorm room. Grounded in resourcefulness and creativity, while using thrifted and pre-loved materials, garments were reimagined rather than replaced. That ethos remains at the core of the brand today. Now, SEMI-stitched continues on a refined but familiar path, bringing together the magic of design with the responsibility of sustainability. With over 300 custom pieces and 30+ original designs, the brand exists as an ongoing project rooted in growth, craftsmanship, and practical sustainable fashion.

LEGACY DESIGN PROGRAM WINNER!!!

Camille Calhoun is a senior fashion design major, business administration minor from Snellville, Georgia. She has always loved fashion since she was young and knew she wanted to become a fashion designer. Her grandmother, a skilled seamstress, was one of her biggest supporters and their shared dream continues to inspire her work today. 

Camille's signature medium, recycled denim, sprouted from a love-hate relationship. As a freshman fashion design major, recycled fabrics quickly became a resource and old jeans were the easiest to come by. While finding ways to use the worn and well-loved denim was harder than she initially imagined, those challenges further propelled Camille into her love of fashion. Today, denim has become the center of her creative process and is a textile she consistently returns to.

She is also passionate about expanding fashion education and access to underserved communities where art is overlooked as a profession, similar to the one she grew up in. Camille has influenced her own creative community to “try even when you don’t know” by documenting the process of creating her first mini collection. Without knowing everything and learning along the way, Camille encouraged other young designer to begin their journeys even when faced with uncertainty in their creative knowledge. In the future, Camille plans to create her own fashion-oriented youth programs to allow young black creatives to gain hands-on fashion knowledge as early as possible, so they can walk into any room knowing they belong.