Interview conducted on December 9, 2022
By Ryan Lowe, edited by Ben Pigott
Ryan: Thank you for allowing me to interview you. I’ve been following you for… I don’t know how long—feels like quite a while though.
Mel: Yeah I feel that way too. Probably like a couple of years I guess, I don’t know.
Ryan: So just very boring, the same ole same ole, to start the conversation. Who are you? Where are you from? And Why do you love fashion?
Mel: My name is Melissa Battifarano, I’ve been a fashion designer for a little over 20 years now. I am originally from New Jersey, but very close to the city and I’ve been in the city my whole adult life. When you’re in fashion, I think you have a love-and-hate relationship with it but there was nothing else I wanted to do. When I was a kid I was always obsessed with fashion and making clothes for my dolls, cutting my doll’s hair, and painting and drawing. Similar to you, I know your mother passed, my mother passed when I was five. So my father raised me and he was quite older, he was 56 when he had me. He had left my mother’s closet as it was, like a shrine, and everyone used to say, ‘You’re mom is such a fashion plate,’—that’s like an old-timey term. Like always wore heels and furs, and when she was dying my dad kind of bought her everything and she had a lot of her clothes custom-made. So it was kind of just trying to think about this idea, I knew my mother but not so well, thinking 'How would she dress now?’ And kind of creating almost a fantasy in my head and I was just obsessed with fashion—any time I could get magazines, I’d go into the paper store, buy my dad the Times every Sunday and ask ‘Can I buy Vogue? Can I buy Bazaar?’ There were so many magazines at the time. Every time I would get him the paper I would be able to buy magazines. And then I learned about WWD and was like, ‘Oh my God, something comes out every day? I can read fashion every day?’ Like, I was, you know, always obsessed with it. There was nothing else I wanted to do besides go to FIT and study fashion.
