Senior Jeanie Chang Designed the 2025 Class Jacket

When the Class of 2025 marched through FitzRandolph Gate for the Pre-rade, the freshmen wore T-shirts designed by Jeanie Chang ’25. Now as they prepare for their final chapter as Princeton students, the graduating seniors will wear their class jacket, which Chang also designed. “It was kind of a full circle moment for me,” says Chang, reflecting on when she heard her design was selected.

Chang, a comparative literature major with minors in poetry, creative writing, and humanistic studies, has a love for fashion. She says it’s been surreal to see classmates wearing her design. “The fact that we wear it for Reunions and graduation and all these very memorable events that we’ll remember for a really long time, it’s very meaningful to me,” she says.

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Jeanie Chang ’25.

Sonya Katarina Isenberg

The front of the black jacket has a block-letter-style P on the left side, orange and white stripes near the bottom, orange cuffs, and an orange collar. Embroidered green ivy creeps up each sleeve and wraps around to the back, surrounding a tiger head that sits inside a shield with the word “Princeton” and the number “25.”

Chang, who was actually on the Commencement committee for class jackets, says friends encouraged her to enter the contest. She came up with the design by soliciting the advice of friends and classmates to ensure the jacket had elements that the graduates would like. She was also inspired by a Princeton crest from the 1920s that she came across in an online archive.

Once the entire class voted, she beat out about 30 other submissions and got to work closely with fellow committee members Greta Herrington ’25 and Diya Kraybill ’25, and Student Organization Program Coordinator Melanie Ibarra to bring the jacket to life. Part of the process included the opportunity for the class to give feedback on the winning design, and there was one element that stood out loud and clear: The class wanted full embroidery. “I’m really glad that we got to give something to the class that people really enjoyed,” Chang says.

Chang’s foray into fashion began during the pandemic when she decided to learn how to use a sewing machine by watching a YouTube video. She had a lot of free time to learn and began creating clothing pieces. That year, she submitted some pieces and won the 2021 YoungArts National Foundation award for design.

Fashion has remained a through line in Chang’s Princeton experience. She’s continued to create, designing Princeton merch for her eating club, the T-shirts for the 2024 Princeton Preview, and dresses for friends to wear to formals. For her senior thesis, she put on a fashion show in Chancellor Green. She created all the pieces from scratch and wrote poems that were mixed into the DJ’s tracks during the show. Her goal was to study style by analyzing the intersection of rhetoric, culture, and translation.

After Princeton, Chang plans to move to New York City to expand her fashion brand, Genie Couture.