For over ten years as part of a unique partnership between the UC Davis Women’s Cardiovascular Medicine Program and the UC Davis Department of Design, fashion design students have created a collection of red dresses to raise awareness that heart disease is the leading cause of death among women. Co-founded by UC Davis cardiologist Amparo Villablanca and lecturer Adele Zhang, who teaches fashion and textile design in the Department of Design, the student red dress collection became the nation’s first program dedicated to women’s heart health.

Each February, new designs for the collection are unveiled at the UC Davis Women’s Heart Care Education and Awareness Forum, but due to the pandemic, the presentation of the new collection has gone virtual. In conjunction with campus COVID protocols, the new additions to the Red Dress Collection were modeled, displayed and filmed outdoors in the new Cruess Hall Makerspace Courtyard.

The finished video includes a retrospective of the overall collection as well as an introduction by Dr. Villablanca, narration by Zhang and interviews with alumna Pooja Morari and Sharon Zhu who received their bachelor’s degrees in design in 2018. They are now the owners of ZhuMorari, a woman-owned and operated business merging cultures through fashion.