As a teenager, Trevor Houston was torn between a future in fashion and one in forensics. Those might seem miles apart, yet Houston’s interests in both fields came from the same place: the part of him that can obsess over just about anything. By day, he took science classes and dreamed of becoming a doctor; by night, he sketched shoes and indulged his voracious appetite for the arts, devouring Jeanne Moreau’s films and studying the sets in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. “I was kind of in my own bubble,” he says of his childhood in Beeville, Texas, a small town south of Austin, with a social-worker mother and an academic father. “I knew what I liked, and I knew what spoke to me.”
Choosing a college pushed him to make a decision. On a whim, he applied to Parsons—his mother had always encouraged his creative side, no doubt seeing something of her own seamstress mother in him. “I’ve always gone with the wind; I just feel it and go for it. I don’t really plan too much,” he says. He was accepted and moved to New York in the fall of 2008.