As History major Adrienne Kronovet began preparing for job interviews during her final year of college, she realized that all of her suits were itchy or ill-fitting. None made her feel empowered. By the time she graduated in May 2017, Kronovet was planning to start her own fashion company, focused on creating workwear that made women feel both comfortable and confident.
Kronovet first became interested in designing her own jacket, and she started attending fabric shows. Inspired by finding an “amazing” Italian quad stretch fabric, Kronovet decided to move to New York City to start her company, Ameliora. “It’s sort of stretchy. It’s soft. It moves with you. And I thought– could I make a suit out of this? Because I knew if I did it, it would make people feel super confident and empowered,” Kronovet explained. Now, she offers a variety of jackets, pants, skirts, shirts, and dresses, all made from the fabric she found during her last year of college.
To name her pieces, Kronovet looks to influential women in her life for inspiration. She currently offers the “Molly” jacket, named for Dr. Molly Worthen, with whom Kronovet took the “Sin and Evil in Modern America” capstone course. “It was one of the first classes where I really started to think critically, and those critical thinking skills have continued with me ever since,” Kronovet explained.
The skills gained through her history education have helped Kronovet get started in the fashion industry. “When you study history, the first thing you’re really taught is to question everything and really try to understand, and that kind of critical thinking has given me an amazing approach to fashion, because through that I’m able to question the norms,” she said. She pointed to her design process as an example. “Our jackets are lined in silk, but our dresses, pants, and skirts also have silk lining on the seams for that added luxury. No one really does that in the industry, but when I came in through this critical thinking approach, I asked: why not? Why do we have to do things this way? Why don’t we try this? And it’s been really successful.”
Fashion is part of Kronovet’s family history, too. Her great-great-great-grandfather sold fabric from a pushcart in New York City after immigrating to the United States, and her grandfather moved to North Carolina to open garment factories near Greensboro. As clothing companies moved production abroad, many garment factories in the Carolinas, including Kronovet’s grandfather’s, shuttered. This family history informed Kronovet’s business decisions. “I knew from the beginning that I wanted to produce in New York to honor my grandfather’s legacy and support American manufacturing,” she said.
Finding a factory to produce her pieces locally was not a challenge for Kronovet. “The garment district in New York is thriving,” she explained. “There are so many wonderful factories that are doing remarkable work.” Now, Kronovet has a number of collaborators in New York, including not only the factories that produce Ameliora’s pieces, but also the experts who help create and print patterns for Kronovet’s designs.
Kronovet based the name of her company on the Greek word melior, which she described as the “idea you can make the world a better place through human effort.” Besides a commitment to supporting American manufacturing, Ameliora donates a portion of all profits to the Healing Heroes Foundation, which funds treatments for veterans with PTSD; the Seleni Institute, which supports maternal mental health; and the Global Housing Foundation, which helps provide housing for the working poor.
Kronovet points to the Greek value of philotimo as her reason for building support of non-profit organizations into her business model. On Ameliora’s website, Kronovet describes philotimo as “the sense of love for family, community and country. Philotimo means having conviction in your core values and principles. It means doing the right thing.” Kronovet first learned about philotimo from the Greek CEO of a private equity firm she interned for in college, and it has shaped her career goals ever since.
“You don’t have to sacrifice your integrity to be successful, and since I heard that at nineteen, that’s something that really resonated with me, and that’s something that I knew that I one-hundred-percent wanted to make the core of my business. You do the right thing because it’s the right thing. That’s it,” she said.
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– Aubrey Lauersdorf