ABOUT

fashion designer • artist • costume designer • stylist

Oneita Parker is an artist, costume and clothing designer, illustrator, and writer. She started drawing before she could walk and making things out of cardboard & masking tape while she learned to talk. Her first Halloween costume she made herself consisted of only blue and green silk scraps from her mom’s fashion design company: She was a fairy, of course. When she was 8, she made her first dress from one yard of Hawaiian fabric. Horrified by the style, it was a bit strappy for an 8-year-old, but not wanting to crush Oneita’s creative spirit, her mother let her wear it to school. Oneita has been making and breaking design rules ever since.

Oneita started wearing tape measures as neck ties with her polo shirts and pop art bright pants. Halloween continued to matter largely, and each year Parker was something new. One year, she was a sorcerer and made a long, lustrous wig out of more silk scraps from her mom’s design studio. When she was in Home Ec., she sewed faster than all the other kids, having learned to sew on her mother’s industrial sewing machine (It weighed 250 pounds with an under-table engine that stitched 2,700 stitches per minute). In high school, her first day of graphic arts, the other kids asked about her drawing, “How do you draw like that? You have to be on drugs to draw that.”

“No, I’ve never done drugs, I just think this way.”

Oneita was Straight Edge before she knew what it was. Listening to the local college radio, New Wave, Punk Rock, and Live 105 was a constant companion as she designed, doodled, and wrote her way into the design world. Being other and loving the weird is where she’s most at home.

Sophomore year, low slung leggings under Bermuda shorts, and Bedouin pants before MC Hammer was a household name, were her style of choice, drafting her own patterns from scratch, designing what would be the most comfortable for her short-waisted body type.

Drawing and fashion became extremely prominent for Parker in her teen years and led to her attending college for Fashion Design a week after graduating from High School. After getting her degree from The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City, Oneita came back to her Bay Area roots and pursued her career in fashion.

The writing was on the wall, the industry was moving overseas, and Oneita was becoming more interested in designing costumes for school plays at her alma mater Montessori school, The White Pony, than designing Mother-of-the-Bride dresses for Karen Alexander. An opportunity arose to move to Los Angeles and switch things up. Always one for adventures in wardrobe and quick-drawing and overnight dives into the gritty realm of independent filmmaking, Oneita took to Hollywood like a honeybee to a rose. Over the years, Oneita has designed and built costumes for Eva Longoria, Christian Slater, Diallo Riddle’s Sherman’s Showcase, Marlon Wayans, Samuel L. Jackson, Mink Stole, Jennifer Coolidge, Nicole Byer, The Cold War Kids, Samsung, Microsoft, Apple, Louraine Toussaint, Annie Potts, Chelsea Lately, as well as several television and feature film releases. Several of these projects have included graphic tees drawn by Oneita.

During the COVID era, Hollywood shut down just as Oneita was pivoting to a graphic tee line and developing a series called The Proper Bunny. Now she is in the process of adapting that project to be a graphic novel featuring several of the established characters that populate the world of Avocado Forest, where the Proper Bunny resides. Oneita currently works and lives in Los Padres National Forest with her wife, director and producer Rosser Goodman, with their American Bully Bunnybear.