The Georgia-born designer was born and raised in Macon, GA. She graduated from Central High School in 2014. She was featured on CNN’s HLN Weekend Express show with Lynn Berry and in multiple other local media outlets for designing a unique duct tape evening dress she wore to her 2014 high school prom and for which she received a national award from the Duct Tape Stuck at Prom competition.
Ronnita Whipple graduated from the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD) in Atlanta in May 2018 with a B.F.A. degree in Fashion Design. She was recently honored by Georgia Pacific and the Susan G. Komen Foundation for creating a dress completely out of sparkly paper towels that she hand painted and dyed pink, helping them raise $77,000 in the fight towards breast cancer. She also was selected as an Emerging Designer by the National Black Arts Festival with her original design displayed in the entrance window at Neiman Marcus at Lenox Square in Atlanta.
Life with Gracie: SCAD student finds hope in a roll of duct tape. Now what?
THE ATLANTA JOURNAL CONSTITUTION
One day recently, Ronnita Whipple sat in a second-floor conference room at Atlanta’s Savannah College of Art and Design remembering the moment her dream of attending the elite university came to her.
She was heading God knows where with her friend and mentor Katherine Hutto, who mentioned the school as a possible place for her after graduation and, well, it stuck in the back of Whipple’s mind.
“I don’t think she realized it resonated with me,” she said. “From that moment on, it became my dream.”
In reality, it seemed an improbable if not impossible dream.
HER STORY HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
Ronnita Whipple keeps inspirational quotations handy.
Whenever doubt creeps in or she feels the urge to quit what she’s doing, she need only look at her bedroom wall at some of the quotes she’s read and heard over the years.
“Anything worth doing is worth doing well,” reads one, written in black paint on her pink bedroom door. “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to sleep, then you’ll see success. ... Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will!”
It’s that spirit of perseverance that drove Whipple to spend more than 400 hours to create a prom dress and tuxedo out of 90 rolls of duct tape as part of the 2014 Duck brand Stuck at Prom Scholarship Contest.