By Madoline Markham Koonce
Aaliyah Taylor’s style is vibrant. It’s eclectic. It’s quirky. And each day, she looks like a walking piece of art she’s created by drawing inspiration from the styles of the 1960s and ‘70s.
By day, you can find the jewelry and fashion designer talking with kids about books as a librarian at the Homewood Public Library, where she sees children’s imaginations come alive and inspire her own.
Earlier this year, for example, Taylor was wearing one of her own designs, an outfit with a floral fabric, when a girl at the library came up to her and was enthralled by what she was wearing.
Knowing Taylor made earrings, the girl pronounced, “You should make flower earrings.”
And that’s just what Taylor did, creating a large, bold design for Margaret’s Funky Flower earrings with Perler Beads to sell on her website, exaltinginbeauty.com.
“The whole goal of my brand is creating wearable art to exalt and enhance the beauty of God’s creation,” Taylor said. “When I dress the way I dress, it’s a beautiful gift because it creates conversation. People say, ‘Look at your glasses! I could never wear glasses like that.’ I hear ‘I can’t,’ so my goal is to shift and say, ‘No, you can!’”
Taylor’s greatest style inspirations have always been the women in her family, particularly her mom. Her great aunt was a seamstress who made wedding dresses for clients, and her mom, a social worker by trade, has always been a “style queen,” Taylor said. Her mom dresses in earth tones with her arms filled with bracelets, giant glasses near her copper mohawk, and large leather earrings she makes reaching down to her chest.
“Her style is very eclectic, natural and warm,” Taylor said. “She knows sneakers more than I know sneakers, and she doesn’t know age.”
Taylor also said her parents instilled the self-confidence in her that she exudes today.
“My parents are plus sized, and they taught me how to love myself at my size,” she said. “I love being healthy and working out, but my goal is to make sure that’s not just who I am. I don’t want to limit myself because of my size.”
Art From Child’s Play
Taylor got her start in jewelry design when she was studying fashion at The Art Institute of Atlanta in 2012 and looking to earn extra money. One day she found herself going through the aisles at Hobby Lobby and stumbling upon colorful plastic Perler beads. Like many kids, she’d used them to create designs on pegboards and then iron them out to melt and fuse them together. It was a fun throwback, but she also found herself wondering what else she might be able to make with them.
A bucket of beads in hand, she started creating Pacman and other designs and making them into earrings she sold to friends; her designs have evolved and grown ever since then.
“I work in color combinations and I love patterns,” she said. “Last year I started experimenting with resin where it looks more like acrylic.”
Then in 2020, Taylor won a grant through Joann Fabric and Crafts that helped her connect with the company behind Perler Beads and eventually led to them offering to partner with her in a bead kit collaboration. Perler chose some of Taylor’s earring designs and then worked with her to design instructional kits for customers.
Today her name and face are on the Perler Bead jewelry kits, which are sold at Joann as well as on Amazon, Perler’s websites and Walmart’s website through a third party – and she gets a royalty from every one sold. Her best-selling kit is her signature exclamation point earring created with black and white beads, but she also encourages kit users to try other colors.
In fact, when she teaches art classes with Perler Beads at the O’Neal and other libraries, she likes to encourage students to do one design following her template closely but after that to get creative with their own variations in design and colors.
“Because now they have the juice and see they are now a jewelry designer, they start seeing what else they can do,” she said. “It creates a spark. You hear more giggling and there’s lots of dancing and grooving. You see it evokes them to become a child again.”
Plus-Sized Fashion
While she continues to design Perler Bead jewelry and to work at the library, Taylor also is pursuing another related dream in fashion design, with a goal to create made-to-order slow fashion with a focus on plus sizes under her brand Exalting in Beauty.
Looking at the industry, she’s seen that there is a lack of high fashion and sculptural editorial pieces in plus sizes, and that’s a niche she wants to fill with her artistic expression.
“My vision is to create wearable art: a sculpted jacket for a plus-sized woman so she can stand up and take up space, dresses with unique textiles and color combinations,” she said.
Right now, that looks like dreaming and sewing from her dining room table on weekends.
“Even though I look like a free spirit, I look at things in patterns and geometry,” she said, noting how she uses the technical skills she learned in art school to translate her sketches of designs into patterns to sew.
Taylor credits Magic City Fashion Week for opening her eyes to see that her dreams in fashion were achievable. In 2022, she created five sculptural, and of course colorful, designs for the Season 4 competition. She didn’t set out to win the competition per se.
“My goal was to defeat the voice in my head that always wants me to quit before I even start and that says you can’t do that,” she said.
But win she did, which helped her connect with Co.Starters, a program for entrepreneurs through Create Birmingham that taught her more about the business side of her dreams. It has helped her take big steps toward creating her own fashion line.
“I realized I built my own lane (with Perler Beads), I can build my own lane in fashion, too,” she said.
To learn more about Taylor’s designs,
visit exaltinginbeauty.com or follow
@exaltinginbeauty on Instagram.
