For the St. Louis American
When Dontia Edwards enters a room, she stands out. Her colorful, raw silk garments hang on her slim body like royal drapes. Her twisted locks of hair spring from swirls of cornrow braids on her head. Her clear face radiates make-up free.It’s no accident. It’s her business.
In 2005, Edwards founded New Images, a fashion design and modeling company set up to counter mainstream images of black people that glamorize Westernized hair, makeup and scantily-clad bodies. Her clothing line, Element 8, promotes natural beauty and clothes that accentuate instead of reveal.
“I want to use clothing as a tool to enhance consciousness of humanity,” said the 26-year-old St. Louis native.
This Saturday, Jan. 13, Edwards will host a seminar and model search to discuss how fashion impacts our environment, health and relationships. She is currently training about 20 models in healthy living in preparation for her debut fashion show in April.
“The whole idea is to create a new way of how people think about fashion and how they dress,” she said.
But Edwards, who is studying fashion design at Lindenwood University, didn’t always feel this way.
“I was extremely materialistic,” Edwards said. “I only wore name-brand clothing. If it didn’t cost a certain amount of money, I wasn’t wearing it.”
This was in high school.
“At 15, I had an $8-an-hour job and all I bought was clothes,” she said. “I went shopping every day. I mean every day.”
All along, Edwards was compiling a wardrobe more fit for a go-go girl than a graduate.
“When I was a junior in high school, I had the J-lo dress (for prom). I designed it. With the real deep V down to there,” she said, pointing to her navel. “After that prom, they (Normandy High School) put on a dress code.”
Meanwhile, “I got a lot of attention from guys,” she said. “And a lot of girls didn’t like me.”
But nothing would stop Edwards from pursuing her dream of becoming a professional “it” girl. Not even poverty.
“I wanted to move to California to be a model and actress,” she said. “I just wanted to be rich and famous.”
So after high school, the fashionista boarded a Greyhound bus along with her boyfriend and headed for the west coast.
But a stop she made in Las Vegas quickly turned her dream into a living nightmare.
During her first week in Sin City, Edwards and her boyfriend gambled away all their savings and spent a night on the street under a box..
For the next several months, Edwards went in and out of jobs and even resorted to doing work she said was not in line with her principles.
By the age of 20, Edwards decided to move to Atlanta, to start over. She soon wound up on the South Beach of Miami.
“I ran out of money,” Edwards said. “But I still had three big bags of clothes.”
For a month, Edwards and her boyfriend lived homeless on the beach.
“I’d go into a hotel and wash up and change clothes,” she said. “I didn’t look like I was homeless. So I began asking for money, spare change, to get something to eat.”
The backdrop of her own poverty was just the awakening she needed.
“When I lost all that stuff, I found the happiest moment of my life,” she said. “Then I realized that material things didn’t bring happiness.”
One day, while she was panhandling, a man gave Edwards $200. She used this money to return to Atlanta where she began reading self-help books to get her life back in order.
Edwards soon learned she was pregnant. Within weeks, she had moved back to St. Louis. The year was 2001.
Since then, Edwards has undergone quite a transformation. She joined a group of cultural purists called the Hebrew Israelites and changed her name to Orneet Baht Israel.
These days, she spends most of her time managing her vision for fashion.
On a recent Sunday, Edwards held a captive audience at the Eternity Vegetarian restaurant in the Central West End, where she trains models weekly.
Her lesson was about the terrible toll meat diets can take on the body.
“What’s the point of being cute, snapping pictures, on television, if all the while you’re destroying yourself?” she said.
As Edwards ran down a heinous history of meat-production politics, one model interjected.
“Oh, my gosh,” said Siedah Henley. “I’ve been brainwashed by the meat people.”
Everyone laughed and nodded in unison.
“No, what you’re learning here is real brain washing,” she said. “What I’m doing is removing the stain.”
This Saturday, Jan. 13, Edwards will host a seminar and model search from 4-6 p.m. at the Regional Arts Commission 6128 Delmar in the Delmar Loop. Call (314) 560-0915.
