Society for Rational Dress

Towards the end of the 19th century, the London-based Rational Dress Society set out to reform women’s fashion by doing away with the constricting and deforming garments typical to the Victorian era. “They fought against prescriptions in fashion,” says Society for Rational Dress founder, and designer Corinne Grassini in explaining why she chose them as the namesake for her line. “They didn’t want to be told what to wear.” While choices in clothing are far from lacking now, Grassini still feels that women’s fashion is subject to cultural prescriptions, dictated by celebrity and the trend machine rather than by what is really right for the individual female figure. Like the Rational Dress Society, Grassini wants women to feel confident and empowered in their clothing and her Society for Rational Dress designs reflect this.

Corinne Grassini is the California-born fashion designer and founder of Society for Rational Dress. Majoring in sociology, Grassini earned her BA from the University of Washington before moving onto a one-year technical design program in her early twenties. She would later go back to school once more in order to hone her pattern making skills at the prestigious Central St Martins in London. Grassini’s interest in society’s social, political and cultural systems, though, remains; it has and will continue to inform her work in fashion and beyond.

Childrens Hospital Los Angeles

Founded in 1901, Childrens Hospital Los Angeles has been treating the most seriously ill and injured children in Los Angeles for more than a century, and it is acknowledged throughout the United States and around the world for its leadership in pediatric and adolescent health. Childrens Hospital is one of America’s premier teaching hospitals, affiliated with the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California since 1932. The Saban Research Institute of Childrens Hospital Los Angeles is among the largest and most productive pediatric research facilities in the United States.

Since 1990, U.S. News & World Report and its panel of board-certified pediatricians have named Childrens Hospital Los Angeles one of the top pediatric facilities in the nation. Childrens Hospital Los Angeles is one of only 10 children’s hospitals in the nation – and the only children’s hospital on the West Coast – ranked in all 10 pediatric specialties in the U.S. News & World Report rankings and named to the magazine’s “Honor Roll” of children’s hospitals.