Anya Ayoung-Chee | Fashion Designer, Entrepreneur, Activist
Winner of Project Runway Season 9
Anya Ayoung-Chee is a fashion designer, social entrepreneur, and strategist. In 2008, she competed at the Miss Universe pageant in Vietnam for her native Trinidad and Tobago. The following year she launched her first collection, Pilar, named after her younger brother. Several years later, Anya inspired millions when she won Season 9 of Project Runway. She then launched her eponymous womenswear line geared toward the resort wear market. Anya’s passion has been to leverage her platform to facilitate opportunities for Caribbean creatives, small business owners and at-risk women. By producing her clothing lines in T&T, she is able to work with and provide training for local seamstresses to sew for the fashion and carnival industries, thus increasing livelihood streams for these women. She channeled her love for Carnival into designing for the largest band in the Caribbean, Tribe, and was co-creative director of The Lost Tribe in its inaugural year. She simultaneously developed the brand, cANYAval, which comprised an e-commerce platform that sold ‘Monday Wear’, a Carnival events company and a production team that curated and supplied carnival costumes for LA, Toronto, Barbados and Jamaica. This experience segued into her newest venture, WYLD FLWR, a festival wear brand and mission driven fashion/technology community that is pioneering the NFT and digital fashion space for Caribbean creatives.
In recent years Anya opened and managed the co-working space HOME as well as HOME Café, Exhibit A boutique, and is co-founder and Director of the Together WI Foundation. In 2020, Anya partnered with Massy to form the social enterprise, Nudge Caribbean, designed to support the growth and development of MSMEs in the region. Having created several businesses and brands over the last ten years, Anya is now focused on applying her many learnings to her current and upcoming ventures with an emphasis on finding innovative approaches to merging creativity, social consciousness and technology, with an emphasis on women’s economic empowerment.
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Matthew Clarke
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Dr. Vanus James
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