Julianne Collections

Julie Jennings is an American designer, known for her flowing soft dress designs using her art for the textile design.

Julie was born in California. Her parents, high school sweethearts now married 64 years are from Sonoma, CA. Her father Robert was an IBM business man and her mother a housewife and interior design creative. Her father's career sent him to many places one of which was Northern Italy. There she was exposed to art and culture of the richness of the area and the surrounding countries. This at an early age has left an impression and an openness enhancing her work as an artist.

Julie designed her first dress at the age of 10 when she learned to operate a sewing machine. Her mother taught her to sew and her father taught her oil painting. Her high school jobs included selling high fashion shoes and Calico Corners Fabrics in Boca Raton, Florida. She also worked for clothing designers and alterations shops to develop sewing skills. She became interested in fabric design and began painting Florida scenes of the ocean, tropical flowers and shells on white clothing and sold them at the local shops in South Florida.

After high school she attended the Atlanta School of Fashion and Design in Atlanta, Georgia and later Florida Atlantic University where she took business classes. She married and moved to Boston where she worked as an artist painting 60-100 garments a week for a company selling clothing of hand painted flowers. She developed her skill of painting on silk for the same company and later was hired by a studio in NYC for textile design. There she developed free-lance art for such designers as Liz Claiborne, Tori Richard and Gottex swimwear to name a few.

From the early 80's to today she stays connected with the textile design industry but has branched out to include her desire for fashion design. "It was completely natural for me to gravitate towards the art of fashion in the colors and textures of the fabric, but now it seems a natural progression to come back to my first passion which is the sewing and draping of the dress." She intends to only use her textile designs in her finished garments combining the skill and talent of the fabric design and the cut and construction of the dress. With a bank of thousands of textile designs and each one provoking an idea of what it might be used for, she is now able to decide.

Currently Julie lives in Atlanta, Georgia has 3 grown children and 2 dogs all of which she derives much joy!