For years, Valentina Delfino, BA’10, has longed to be the answer to the fashion industry’s most important question: “Who are you wearing?” But she didn’t think she would garner such recognition so early in her career.

Delfino’s sartorial dream came true in February at the 84th Academy Awards when actress Missy Pyle, a star of “The Artist,” which won an Oscar for Best Picture, wore one of her designs to the ceremony.

[media-credit name=”Valentina Delfino” align=”alignright” width=”350″][/media-credit]The dress, which was fabricated by Emmy Award-winning costume designer Birgit Müller, was made of organic chiffon with a recycled polyester lining. It was designed for the Red Carpet Green Dress competition, which was created by Suzy Amis Cameron, the wife of “Avatar” director James Cameron.Delfino beat out hundreds of entrants in this year’s competition.The young design star, who traveled to Los Angeles for Pyle’s fitting and to help prepare the actress for the awards show, didn’t know for whom she was making a dress — Pyle didn’t commit to the competition until eight days before the Oscars — but that didn’t matter. Her dress, which she called “a glamorous Greek look for the modern woman” with pleats designed to create an elegant silhouette, was designed to look great on any woman.

Since the Oscars, Delfino has designed menswear displayed on the runway at Miami Fashion Week, attended a conference on retail luxury goods and continued to apply for competitions like the one that brought her to Hollywood.The Venezuela native will graduate with a master’s in fashion from the Miami International University of Art and Design in December — ahead of schedule, thanks to an academic overload — and hopes to continue her education in one of the nation’s great Madison Avenue fashion houses.“Fashion is very competitive and to succeed you have to do more than just what you would do in school,” she said. “So I want to work for established designers next and learn as much as I can from them.”