"Fashions fade; style is eternal," said the late, great Yves Saint Laurent. This sums up where I think the fashion industry fails us as consumers. The mainstream fashion media pushes a certain look, which is no more apparent than when flipping through the many editorials styled with looks pulled straight off the runways. Sure, the end result is beautiful, but where's the fun in mass-produced fashion? As consumers, we're so encouraged to follow the trends and obtain the latest "it" items that we neglect to make fashion our own.

But while I'm tired of so much sameness in the fashion industry, I continue to be inspired by the street style movement. There's a certain cool factor that results when remaking a fashion to fit your unique style, whether you're mixing Celine with vintage thrift finds and awesome new labels like Hood by Air, or DIY-ing an ensemble from head to toe. The best style is surprising and inventive, two descriptions that also apply to the best of today's startups. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the merging of a style-savvy, DIY attitude with modern technology resulted in Bow & Drape, a startup that promises to completely reinvent retail as we know it.

Theirs is a simple but brilliant concept: give the consumer the power to create what she wants to wear. Bow & Drape is a decidedly modern reinvention of the classic dressmaking tradition, when seamstresses worked with their clients to create outfits that fused fashion with personal style; but in lieu of lengthy and expensive one-on-one consultations at the tailor, Bow & Drape leverages technology to offer the modern woman the opportunity to design her own personalized wardrobe.

Bow & Drape's design process consists of three parts.

1. Choose: Customers choose a base design from Bow & Drape's collection. Currently, designs from both the spring and resort lines are available for purchase. Based on your unique measurements, Bow & Drape's style experts can recommend flattering hemlines, sleeve lengths, and silhouettes.
2. Customize: Customers have the option to purchase designs as-is or make the design their own. Different fabric, sleeve, color, pattern, hem, appliqué, lettering, button, trim, ribbon, pom pom, strap, and pocket options are available for customers to mix and match to create the design of their dreams.
3. Create: All Bow & Drape clothing is produced to order, arriving at the customer's door within two weeks from their factories in Las Vegas and New York.

The Bow & Drape concept is a welcome rejection of trend-heavy fast fashion in favor of classic styles and statement pieces easily transformed to fit the consumer's personality. Plus, "having a hand in the creation process of anything makes you love it that much more," founder Aubrie Pagano said. And she should know: Bow & Drape was born from her search for the perfect dress.

At the time, she had a full-time job in finance, but on nights and weekends, Pagano was indulging her love of fashion by helping a friend's cousin launch a clothing line, providing financial and strategic expertise as well as manual labor -- sewing buttons, drafting patterns, and helping with the collection's development. A year into this arrangement, Pagano ran into a familiar problem: she had nothing to wear to an upcoming event.

"I was going to meet my boyfriend's extended family for the first time at a wedding, so I wanted to look great and feel comfortable and confident, but I couldn't find anything that suited my style," she said. Her "endless retail search"-during which everything "was the wrong color, or the quality wasn't quite right, or it looked like every other dress on the market"-proved frustrating, so much so that she decided to just make her own.

Working in her spare time, it took a month to take the dress from first sketch to final stitch, but the end result was worth the effort. "I felt confident and beautiful, and I got a ton of compliments on [the dress]. I thought, I love feeling like this; I wish that I could do [custom clothing] more often and be able to afford it." Pagano searched for a solution online, but couldn't find any retail sites that allowed creative customization. "So I said, 'You know, I'm going to do something about this.' I thought that we could provide women everywhere the chance to make something look beautiful and [make it] their own, and not have to pay a thousand dollars for it."

Buoyed by the knowledge she'd acquired while working in finance, Pagano quit her day job to focus solely on the development of her custom clothing concept. "I went into [finance] to pay off my student debt, and because I thought it'd be a good chance to learn a bit more about business," she said. "I've always been entrepreneurial-I started my first business when I was six. So I always knew when I graduated school that I wanted to start something; I just hadn't saved up the money or felt that I had the business acumen to try. So finance fueled that passion [in launching Bow & Drape], both from a knowledge and monetary standpoint."

When it came time to secure the funding needed to go to production in the latter half of 2012, Pagano turned to the modern innovator's best friend: Kickstarter. "It was a great way to test if women out there actually desired this kind of clothing," she said. Turns out, they do, as Bow & Drape's campaign raised $32,343 (surpassing their $30,000 goal) from 184 backers.

Since then, Pagano's worked hard to grow the business. She's expanded the company's offerings from an initial collection of just six designs (three dresses, a jacket, and two skirts), to customizable sweatshirts, t-shirts, blazers, trench coats, pants, shorts, totes, and clutches, too; the resort line even includes swimsuits and coverups. Bow & Drape has added to their customization options, as well, with more choices of buttons, lettering, trim and appliqués.

"Our success really hinges on our customer's happiness with our product," Pagano said. "We've found that people have a lot of fun with it. Sweatshirts, in particular, have had a big moment this year, but having a fashion sweatshirt that you really have the ability to express yourself, in any way…people have had fun with that. And, it's a really accessible entry point to the brand since they start at $58. They're pretty affordable for almost everybody."

Affordability and accessibility play key roles in Bow & Drape's success, especially because word of mouth has fueled a great deal of their brand awareness. Clearly, the word is good, as to date, only six percent of the goods sold have been returned, and revenue has grown 300 percent over the past two years. These are just two reasons Bow & Drape won't be the best-kept industry secret for long; additionally, their relocation from Boston to NYC's Garment District late last year served to place them in the heart of fashion retail and production, and they started 2014 with a bang, raising $1.2 million in seed funding to grow their team and expand their methodologies for customization. "We'll be introducing a lot more types of customization moving forward in subsequent seasons," Pagano said. "We'll really be the place where, whether you want to embroider something or bling it out or really tailor it, we're your one stop shop. The other side of that is continuing to build our community. We have community members who are really engaged, who like to design a lot of pieces for themselves, so giving them their own personal space to showcase their designs and encourage others."

Additionally, some of the seed money will go towards expanding their selection of 3-D printed items, which at present includes zipper pulls and belt buckles. "I like 3-D printing as another methodology to customize something," she said. "It's totally conducive to what we're doing, it's cost-effective to prototype, and it allows people to have more choices and control over what their end product looks like. We have a lot of really cool hardware in the works that we'll be releasing later this year, but we can't talk about it yet. It'll be an awesome surprise!"

Even as Bow & Drape experiences rapid growth, Pagano continues to make good on her mission. "It's always been about making women feel gorgeous and confident in their clothes," she said. "The Bow & Drape woman is current, she's smart, and she's bored with retail today. She knows what she wants when she sees it, and she doesn't experiment so much with trends. She's looking for quality and something that she feels can really be part of her own style. We want every woman to feel like a million bucks because she's wearing something that's totally her style and uniquely her own."

You can feel like a million bucks, too! Bow & Drape is giving ET readers 15% off any purchase with code EXACT! Don't forget to share your creations with the Bow & Drape community on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook! #BowandDrape