Of the 25 years Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator’s Technical Embroidery Specialist Samanta Cortes has spent in the fashion industry, 20 years have been spent in the embroidery world taking machines to the extreme. No stranger to pushing the boundaries of fashion models or machines, Cortes is resilient, creative and ready to tackle the next big thing. For her that always seems to end up circling the orbit of embroidery.

“My deepest passion has been stabilizing and growing manufacturing in the U.S. by educating my community and understanding the manufacturing equipment that will impact our future generations.” -Samanta Cortes.

A veteran of the industry, Cortes says she started her embroidery career in the NYC fashion industry purchasing lace, trims, and braids for a lingerie company and quickly fell in love with the textile side of the industry and started her embroidery career in the Schiffli industry over two decades ago.

Samanta Cortes and crew, 2003

“This taught me to design and layer and the proper repeats as well as understanding Venice lace and special treatments to the textiles. This experience has made me push the machines to a different level as I get a thrill on having machine companies and his programming experts take a look at the designs and say how did you do that?” says Cortes.

The unique style of Schiffli embroidery is manufactured by applying machine embroidering with front yarn and back yarn on base cloth using the Schiffli Embroidery machine. The features that differentiate this embroidery from other kinds of lace are its freedom of design and ability to create luxurious three-dimensional effects. Cortes says her time working with the machines has given her a head start fusing old techniques like those learned on the Schiffli with new machines at the BF+DA...

Read the full interview on the Brooklyn Fashion + Design Accelerator.