“The girl who wears Whitney Manney clothes is ambitious, determined and has no barriers. She just does what she wants to do.”

Kansas City fashion designer Whitney Manney knows her audience — and owns her aesthetic.

Bold Aztec- and Southwestern-inspired graphics (Manney, a Kansas City Art Institute senior, briefly lived in Phoenix) combined with shocking shapes, textures and silhouettes commanded attention with every models’ step down the runway.

(Check out part of the pre-show run through below}

Manney also showed on-trend brights and geometric shapes for a downtown cool look that could have easily been worn out of the Central Gallery + Event Space in the Crossroads District to one of the hip bars mere blocks away.

As for hair and makeup, Manney sought the talents of local hairstylist Mariah Day and makeup artist Felicia Suzanne Gilliland.

“I wanted to make their eyes look like sunbursts and sunrises,” Gilliland says of the makeup looks on the models.

The attention didn’t stop at the eyes, though. For hair, Day says she was inspired by the Japanese aesthetic for the colorful hair pieces that some models wore.

For models with natural hair, Day created volume and lift for showstopper hair. “Whitney wanted big hair, so I teased it, spritzed it and sprayed it,” Day says.

For Whitney, though, big hair makes sense — because with this rising local talent, it’s all about go big or go home.

She showed 15 pieces for her senior year collection, and she’s not slowing down anytime soon. The designer is launching an online retail store, is hunting down studio space and will be showing more pieces at Kansas City Fashion Week in September.

“Gratifying,” she says when describing her collection. “This is four years of everything. It’s just truly, honestly gratifying.”

Her parents couldn’t agree more.

“This is Whitney’s world,” her mother says. “I just live in it.”

To see more pictures from the Whitney Manney Spring/Summer 2012 Fashion Show, visit the kimberlyloc.com Facebook page!