Message was clear
By Nadine Kam
for isle designer
Amos Kotomori
Features EditorAMOS Kotomori believes in signs. A few years ago, a little voice told him he needed a change. He packed up and headed to New York to attend film school. On his second day there, he was offered a job. Then, when he was getting ready to return home about a year ago, he was offered a job with Turner Broadcasting.
"I thought I'd come home and wait 30 days for an answer," he said. Within 30 days, he had two projects lined up in Hawaii, which convinced him that he needed to be here.
One of those projects is Joe Moore's upcoming film "Moonglow," on which Kotomori served as art director. The second project is "The Gift," a benefit fashion show for Kauai's Wilcox Hospital which takes place Nov. 14 and celebrates the hospital's 60th anniversary.
This will mark the first time in 10 years that Kotomori will be staging a fashion show of his own designs.
After working several years as a clothing designer -- earning the Hawaii Fashion Guild Designer of the Year title in 1980, 1981 and 1985, and the First Lady's Award for Fashion in 1983 and 1985 -- Kotomori branched out, establishing his own production company and modeling agency for commercial work of every kind.
His intent in heading to The New York Film Academy, started by Robert DeNiro, was to learn to view his own work with a director's eye, and to bring a cinematic quality to his commercial work.This year, Kotomori was named Advertising Person of the Year by the American Advertising Federation. So to most of his old friends, coming back to stitch up 110 garments and create matching accessories with the help of his mom and her friends, seemed to be a step backward.
"Everyone asks me 'Are you going to be a director now?' They think I'm crazy to have gone to film school and come back to do the same thing.
"I wonder about that myself, but it feels right. ... I like the idea of helping to raise funds for a meditative garden on the hospital grounds. All of us have so much daily stress, and it only hits us when we visit someone in the hospital or when we're in the hospital ourselves. There's a time when healing thoughts can make us stronger."
He said he's having a lot of fun working with the show's 60 volunteer models, ages 15 to 90-plus, who range from a size 3 to 22.
"It's great to me that the people of Kauai, in spite of all the island's economic problems, come out to support an event like this. It's a clear message of community, taking the time to be together," Kotomori said. "Projects like these take on their own shape and reason and kind of tell you what's right or wrong."
Therefore, he's learned to accept the concept of flow, allowing things to occur as they will. Kotomori didn't make up his mind to pursue the "Moonglow" project until he saw another sign while driving down St. Louis Heights Drive, and it wasn't any big old red "Stop" sign.
"I was looking at the side of the road and I saw an old upright piano that someone was throwing away. I had just finished reading a scene from the script and a piano was essential to that scene."
Another time, he traveled to England and on the spur of the moment decided to make a side trip to Morocco, where he stayed at a 14-bedroom casbah and dined on meals inspired by produce from the casbah's gardens.
On his departure, he looked back through the plane window and saw the snow-capped Atlas Mountains, recognizing in them a painting he created in the third grade at Royal Elementary.
"I had never seen snow when I did that painting. I called them Hot Fudge Sundae Mountains because that's what the brown and white looked like to me.
"I was ridiculed by my classmates, but all of a sudden, my drawing was sent to the Academy of Arts to be displayed as an example of elementary school art. I've always remembered that incident because of the combination of ridicule and praise.
"All this taught me that there is destiny. There are messages out there. I learned I need to listen to these messages because they make life fun."
On stage
What: "The Gift," a fashion show by Amos Kotomori to benefit the Wilcox Hospital, with dinner and dancing
