CIVILIAN . CHOU, RHIANNON

FEMALE

BISEXUAL

NINETEEN

MAY 28, 1992

1/2 TAIWANESE FROM FATHER’S SIDE, 1/2 FRENCH-AMERICAN FROM MOTHER’S SIDE.

FLUENT IN ALL FRONTS OF ENGLISH, FAIRLY PROFICIENT AT SPEAKING MANDARIN CHINESE. KNOWS A SMALL SMATTERING OF FRENCH, BUT HER GRAMMAR IS SHODDY AT BEST.

RHI, RIA, CHOU-CHOU

0.5

CIVILIAN

N/A

N/A

N/A

SYLPH

GABRIEL KINGSTON
BAILEY WHELAN
KONSTANTIN LENHOFF

VERY HIGH

LOTTI BASKERVILLE FROM PANDORA HEARTS

A college sophomore (and soon-to-be junior) studying Fashion Design at Otis College of Art and Design, Rhiannon is currently in the process of moving out of her dormitory room and into a small apartment in Santa Monica that she will eventually share with one other roommate. It will be a bit snug for two people to stay in, but with rent being as high as it is these days, she really doesn’t have much of a choice in the matter. However, she does occasionally go to visit her family a short ways away in San Marino every few weekends or so, during which she (obviously) takes up residence in their fairly spacious two-story house. Hey, you can't blame her, it's a very nice house. It is a fairly comfortable living situation she has going on at home, seeing as how her family is solidly in the upper middle class. However, her father seems to be hellbent lately on teaching her how to manage her money responsibly. Needless to say, it's something that Rhiannon probably won't appreciate for a few more years down the road.

Well, it's certainly hard to not notice Rhiannon, that's for sure -- pastel pink hair isn't exactly subtle, you see. Nor is it natural -- her hair is actually a very dark brown, as one will see when she forgets to go get the roots of her hair bleached and touched up with more dye. Rhiannon's hair isn't the only thing about the girl that is not its original color, as she almost always wears pink colored contacts of the circle lens variety to mask the dark brown of her eyes. As far as Rhiannon is concerned, she got the short end of the stick when it comes to natural colors -- hence why she goes out of her way to pick colors that make her stand out. And pink certainly does the trick -- and it's her favorite color to boot.

At 5'4", Rhiannon stands on the shorter end of average and can be considered slender. Not as slender as she would like though -- it would seem that her body type is closer to that of the women from her French-American mother's side of the family than that of the women on her Taiwanese father's side of the family. Which, in simpler terms, means she's got some visible curves when she would much rather be a stick or a twig. She is also surprisingly pale for someone who lives in Los Angeles, although that might be because she used sunscreen religiously -- or these days, BB creams with SPF protection and supposedly whitening properties. Whether or not they actually work is still up in the air.

Seeing as how fashion design majors are (unfortunately) often in competition with each other over their appearances, Rhiannon goes the whole nine yards to make sure that she looks her best even when she feels like... well, shit. Needless to say, she rarely ever goes out the door without her hair done and a full face of makeup (false eyelashes included) while being dressed to the (casual by fashion student standard) nines, even on a school day. For Rhiannon, this means lace dresses, cardigans, filmy scarves, tights with fancy little boots, and an assortment of jewelry and accessories. All topped with a stylish handbag, of course -- fashion majors don't carry backpacks, she had learned very quickly early on during freshman year. Well... she supposes that a few sacrifices must be made.

The first rule of fashion design is to have a clear vision. That means that you cannot lose sight of what makes your designs you. Rhiannon has a clear sense of exactly who she is, and an even clearer idea of who she wants to be -- both things that she is proud of. And that is exactly the thing: she is proud, and she is loud. Pride, after all, is something that one must have if one is to succeed in a field where having an ego might as well be a requirement. (And Rhiannon will tell you to never believe it when a fashion designer says that they are modest about their work -- it is an all an act, because the world of fashion is all about showing off, and modest people do not show off.) She desires to be noticed is the bottom line here, and if strutting her stuff is what it takes, then that is what she'll do.

Pride, though, is a flimsy and fickle thing, and in the fashion world, with all of its divas and primadonnas, everyone is trying to cut you down. Rhiannon learned this the hard way, and as a result, had to quickly throw together an iron skin for herself. She wears her clothes like battle armor, the two-faced words and looks of thinly veiled contempt from all of the other fashion students being the very blows that they must defend her against. It was a lesson that was quickly learned, the lesson that you must make a spectacle, hold your head high, and above all else, never, ever let anyone think for even a second that you are cowering -- even when you are. Remember to be proud, remember to be assertive, and most of all, remember to be vicious, because only the most cutthroat would survive in the world of fashion. Talent alone will only get you so far, unfortunately. But because her defense was so hastily put together, it is easily dented -- even if she doesn't let it show, Rhiannon takes criticism very, very personally.

The second rule of fashion design is to fight tooth and nail to do something that no one else has ever done before. The more original design, the better -- you want to wow the spectators and steal the limelight on the runaway. Competition is beyond fierce, and Rhiannon knows this all too well. After all, fashion majors are always trying to one-up each other, and she herself is no exception to this. Because she wants to succeed, and success in fashion means being more stylish, more chic, more glamorous than everyone else, all while managing to maintain something that is unequivocally and irrevocably your own. In that respect, Rhiannon is a very jealous girl, because she wants to be better than everyone else at all times, even if that is, in all honesty, impossible. There will always be someone who is better, and that is a fact she hates more than anything else.

But on the flip side, she is, as it should already be clear, ambitious. Rhiannon has both a dream and the drive to go for it with 110% -- something that some would say she has in her favor. Perhaps she is simply stubborn, or even obstinate, but the fact that she refuses to stay down if she can help it has served her well to this point in time. In some ways, it is the only thing that is keeping her going, the fact that she so stubbornly wants to see her designs on the Fashion Week runways someday. Rhiannon has a clear set of goals for herself to accomplish, among which is to eventually transfer out of Otis and into her dream school, Parsons School of Design all the way across the country in New York. The bigger the name, the better -- and as far as Rhiannon knows, Parsons is the biggest name when it comes to fashion schools. If you want to make it big, you have to start big.

The third rule of fashion is to be accessible in the end. The runway was for the glamour and the glitz, but at the end of the day, fashion had to also be something that the general public could participate in too. That, perhaps, is where Rhiannon runs into problems. You see, the deal with Rhiannon is that she has a bit of an obsession with the idea of things being pretty. If she could help it, she would live her life surrounded only by pretty things. Pretty clothes, pretty people, pretty places, pretty food -- and in that respect, she is both rather shallow and most definitely unrealistic. Rhiannon doesn't like to admit that there are ugly things out there, which is a bit ironic considering that she currently lives in Los Angeles, a city where a lot of really ugly things happen. As a result, she can be pretty naive and perhaps a tad too idealistic because of her denial that the world is, in all honesty, a rather ugly place. Unfortunately, she is more than content with staying inside of her little bubble of pretty and ignoring everything that doesn't fit inside.

There wasn't anything particularly interesting about her early childhood, as far as Rhiannon Ziwei Chou is concerned. She was simply just the only daughter and second child of a man named Zhongwei Chou, a Taiwanese immigrant-turned-doctor who had studied in America during his college years, and her mother, a woman by the name of Bernadette Duchamp, a first-generation French-American who taught music at the local high school. Push come to shove, Rhiannon might admit that she was one of the... more fortunate children in the world, to put it lightly. Fortunate, because she lived and grew up in the relatively safe city of San Marino. Fortunate, because by being the second child, she avoided the responsibility of being the oldest that her brother, Quentin, was burdened with, but was old enough to not be the baby of the family like her younger brother, Paris. Fortunate, because she came from a loving family and a warm home where she wanted for nothing. Fortunate, because she was the princess in her own storybook fairytale. It was both a blessing and a curse, Rhiannon would come to realize.

She was much closer to her mother than she was her father growing up, perhaps because Rhiannon found that she could, for lack of a better way of putting it, relate to Bernadette better. Which, all in all, wasn't a very surprising thing -- her father was usually at work at the UCLA Medical Center, and she didn't see very much of him in her early childhood because of that. It was from her mother that Rhiannon's love for fashion would sprout from. She remembers watching her mother dress up in the mornings, wide-eyed and in awe at just how lovely her mother looked. She remembers the pretty blouses frilled with lace and the twirly knee-length skirts in bright and vivid jewel tones, the shiny nude high-heeled pumps and strings of real pearls around her neck, the hair ribbons that always matched the skirt of the day that her mother tied her thick ginger hair back with and the red Chanel lipstick that painted her lips. To little Rhiannon, Bernadette was the most beautiful woman in the whole world, and she wanted to grow up to be just like her.

Rhiannon couldn't wait for the day where she could shed her school uniform and start to wear pretty clothes like her mother did. Because the school uniforms that she was forced to wear during elementary school were boring and dull, and everyone looked the same, so very dreadfully the same. But then middle school rolled around, along with the glorious day where the uniforms were folded away into cardboard boxes and put away into the garage once and for all. Now began the new era of little skirts and colorful tops, tiny jackets and ballet flats, jewelry borrowed from her mother and (towards the very end of eighth grade) drugstore makeup. Rhiannon was one of those girls, the ones who always came to school overdressed and too made-up that the teachers rolled their eyes at. They told her to tone it down, but couldn't quite get her in trouble because she did follow the school dress code -- something that Rhiannon's mother made sure she was aware of. But even so, Rhiannon didn't stop, because she finally felt pretty, and yes, pretty was good.

In a way, she relished the attention that looking pretty (at least she thought she was pretty) bought her. But simply being pretty wasn't enough -- she wanted to be remembered, to make an impression. At some point early on in high school, Rhiannon started reading the fashion magazines at the hair salon she went to. Vogue, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, Nylon -- and within the pages of those magazines, she was introduced to the world of fashion designers. Ellie Saab, Alexander McQueen, Christian Dior, Valentino, and a whole plethora of other designers that ruled the runways of the fashion world -- she wanted her name to be up there with them, up in the lights of a world where the clothes and people and places were always so very, very pretty. She was naive, so to speak, to think that the fashion world was a pretty place, something that she wouldn't realize until it was too late. True, it looked pretty, so pretty that it made her heart physically hurt, but this was where her posh upbringing came back to bite her in the ass.

Going to fashion school meant having a portfolio -- an outstanding portfolio, she was told, if she wanted to make it into the top fashion school in the entire nation: Parsons School of Design. Rhiannon made the mistake of only applying to her dream school, and the rejection letter that came in some months later was the first of a series of nasty wake-up calls. Life, as it she would find out soon enough, was no longer keen on handing everything to her on a silver platter. Rhiannon was, without a doubt, a privileged child, and because of that, had never truly known the meaning of hard work. What the girl did know a little bit too well, however, was pigheaded stubbornness -- and that was, perhaps for once, her saving grace. She would apply for Parsons again as spring admit, but under the advice of her father (who was, without a doubt, the more sensible of her two parents, no matter which way you tossed the dice), also applied to other fashion schools in the United States just in case Parsons rejected her application again. They did.

Rhiannon did, however, end up going as a spring admit to Otis College of Art and Design. Truth be told, she didn't particularly want to go to Otis, but both her mother and father agreed that it would be best if she did go. She could always apply to transfer to Parsons, her father said, and the skills she would learn while at Otis might just very well give her the extra push she needed to make her portfolio Parsons-worthy. That, perhaps, was the only reason why Rhiannon decided to go to Otis in the end -- because she wanted to go to Parsons, and if going to Otis for one, two, or maybe even three years was going to help her achieve it, then so be it. She'd make Parsons want her to attend their fashion school. She would make them want her more than any other student that ever applied there ever. All Rhiannon wanted was to have life be the way she wanted it to be, not realizing that nothing was ever so simple. Simply put, she was asking for the impossible.

She hated it at Otis, because it was not where she wanted to be. No matter how good the school was (because truth be told, Otis was already rather prestigious in its own right), the fact was that it was not the school that Rhiannon wanted to attend, and that, of course, made all the difference. It didn't help that the fashion students at Otis where, in some ways, even more stubborn than her -- something that Rhiannon was surprised to learn, because she knew for a fact that she was already as stubborn as a bull, if not more so sometimes. However, that was not the big thing. The big thing was, without a doubt, the persisting undertone of competition among even friends, much less peers. Whereas Rhiannon had once felt like the uncontested queen of fashion back in high school, such was not the case anymore at Otis. Like almost every other student in the fashion department, she soon too fell prey to the borderline catty world of fashion school politics, where it was just as important to have the best concept for a theoretical spring or fall collection as it was to be voted and praised as the day's best-dressed fashionista.

Those, of course, were the lessons Rhiannon learned outside of the classroom during her first semester at Otis -- and they were very, very ugly lessons, as far as she was concerned. Sometimes, she would wonder if it was only going to get worse at Parsons, because that was where the fashion elite went to school. How much worse would the competition and constant backstabbing be in a place where the students were not only even better at what they did, but knew it as well? That was a (very possible) reality that Rhiannon didn't want to think about. (She is in denial, no matter how much she insists she isn't.) No, this was simply just a stepping stone, and in another semester or two, she will apply to Parsons again. This time, she plans on getting accepted, and everything will be right again. But until then, it will be just before, just like waiting for elementary school to end so that she could shed the ugly uniform to once again clothe herself in pretty things.