Making it work: Mankato teen brings her style to 'Project Runway Junior'

Hawwaa Ibrahim is running on about four hours of sleep.

She stayed up late, late, late working on her dress for a high school dance — which she just decided to make last night.

It's a red satin romper with a deep-V neckline, sequins up the sides and a tulle peplum that grazes the floor.

"I don't think anyone else will have a jumpsuit like this," Ibrahim laughs, adjusting the pancake-sized sequins on the coordinating faux-fur coat.

Ibrahim is a senior at Mankato West High School in Mankato, Minn., population 41,000. There aren't a lot of formal red satin rompers running around there — or anywhere else. Ibrahim's creation is hers alone. And while designing and sewing a dress on a whim — in just under eight hours — isn't a typical Friday night for your average 17-year-old, Ibrahim has become an expert under pressure. Audiences across the country have been watching her speed through design projects on "Project Runway Junior."

The show, which is the high school spin-off of the wildly popular "Project Runway" with Tim Gunn, was filmed in New York City this summer. Now, halfway through the airing of the show's second season, Ibrahim has made it through five high-pressure, nail-biting, sequin-filled runway showdowns without being voted off.

The format is simple: The 12 young designers on the show, who range in age from 14 to 17, are given a fashion assignment and just over a day to design it, sew it, style it and send it down the runway on a model. But this isn't "Make a dress for your high school dance." Think: "Make an avant-garde dress inspired by fencing armor" or "Incorporate LED lights into your outfit."

At one point, Ibrahim found herself snatching an inflatable watermelon out of a pool so she could deflate it and turn the bright vinyl material into a jacket. Things get crazy.

Now, back in Mankato, Ibrahim knows the outcome of the show, but she can't tell anyone. She has to sit down every Thursday night, with her mom and her high school friends — even her A.P. Government teacher is watching these days — and watch her summer unfold all over again, this time with edits.

Ibrahim lives with her mom and her siblings in a ground-floor apartment in Mankato. She became fascinated with fashion when she was 12 after watching the adult version of "Project Runway" on TV. Two years later, her mom bought her a sewing machine. Now, she said, everything she knows, she's learned from YouTube: "I YouTubed 'How to make pants,' 'How to put elastic in a skirt, 'How to make a sleeve.'"

Her work area is her bedroom floor.

"I do everything on the floor: cutting, patterning, measuring, ironing — all on the floor. There's not a lot of space," she said. "I got used to it."

Ibrahim describes her style as a mix of vintage and retro, with splashes of modern color. Her face is punctuated with piercings — a nose ring, two lip studs. ("I used to have more," she said, laughing.) And when she's all done up, her eyebrows sparkle with a thick, bright, craft store layer of glitter. She even has a YouTube tutorial on how to achieve that fierce brow look.

Topping it off is her hijab, which sparked a fervor on social media, she said, once the show started airing. Some people don't understand why she wears it, while others don't realize it has to do with her religion.

"I think when a lot of people think of people in hijabs, or Muslims, they think they're confined to one thing and they can don't anything normal people do," Ibrahim said. "It was nice to show people that I'm human, and I can do whatever I want. That's the way I was thinking about it on the show: I have to show people that I'm as normal — well, not that normal — but as normal as anyone else."

In her bedroom, she's tacked a pencil drawing of Marilyn Monroe blowing a bubble to the wall. On her sketch is Monroe's famous quote: "Being normal is boring."

Ibrahim was excited that the show also gave her an opportunity to design wild, innovative designs that are still modest, challenging the fashion-world stereotype that taking risks means getting risque.

"I think with fashion, people think you have to show a certain amount of skin to be sexy," Ibrahim said. "I think that's unnecessary, because fashion is the clothes. So why are you showing your body so much? I think you can still be fashionable without showing too much skin."

Getting out of Minnesota for the show last summer was a tantalizing taste of what Ibrahim hopes is her future: living and designing in New York City. She's planning to finish school this year and find a job to save money for college. She'd like to major in fashion or business.

She'd also like to live somewhere slightly more fashionable than Mankato.

"Minnesota is okay, but it's boring," she said into the camera on the show's opening episode. It's hard to be fashionable, after all, when you're hiding everything you wear under a giant parka.

"In the winter, I'm like: There's no point," Ibrahim said. Fashion "doesn't even matter, because you don't want to die of frostbite, so you just throw on your coat and hat."

Her latest project — a mini-collection displayed on mannequins in the corner of her room — is inspired by candy; she loves the bright pops of color. And she hopes to launch her online store soon, where she plans to sell T-shirts and other original designs. People on social media have been flooding her with requests. But first, she has to study: Reality TV doesn't get you out of finals.

Thursday night, she'll sit down to watch the sixth episode of the show with her family, including her mom, who "gets way into it," Ibrahim said. "She's all over it, saying what was good and what was bad, and that the judges don't know what they're talking about it."

How else is a mom supposed to handle watching her teenage daughter on television?

"I'm happy she's enjoying it," Ibrahim laughed.

It's odd to watch herself on TV, she said, and to see the final cuts of episodes, even though she was there when it all happened. When she sees her designs going down the runway, she dreams of going back to New York, of finding that design internship, of having money to buy more fabric.

But then, of course, she remembers: "You have to go to school tomorrow."