“I’m considering applying to go to FIT for a degree in fashion.”
That is what Shauna Rae said in a PEOPLE-exclusive clip in December 2022 — one sentence fans have argued about ever since. She was 23, and she had just laid out the plan: a clothing line “adjustable for all types of human beings,” built to “fit little people and anyone else on the beauty spectrum.”
Honest note first: there is no breaking news about Shauna Rae today, and no new announcement about school. What there is, nearly three years after that clip, is a question that never got answered — and two camps who answer it very differently.
The Night She Said It Out Loud
The clip was short, but the vision was specific. Shauna was not talking about a hobby. She was talking about adaptive apparel — clothes for bodies the fashion industry ignores — and she named the school that could teach her to build it: the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. She had lived the problem every morning — altering clothes never cut for a 3-foot-10 adult woman.
Then she made the question harder, not easier: she started designing anyway. In early 2023 she modeled a sparkly outfit of her own design on Instagram — flared pants and a crop top, then rolling by on pink roller skates. Her caption said she was “currently working on sizing for 5’4” and below.” The prototype was real; the degree was still only a sentence.
The Brooklyn Test Was Really About School
A week after that clip aired, the show tested the question for real. On January 3, 2023, Shauna drove toward Brooklyn with her younger sister Rylee to try the city on for size. The idea came from her own parents, Patty and stepdad Mark, and the point of the Brooklyn trial run was in the open: she was weighing whether to apply to FIT, and she needed to know if she could live in New York.
YOU MAY LIKEThe Baby Cancer Battle That Made Her 3-Foot-10: Shauna Rae’s Full Health JourneyThe season finale, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?,” framed it as fashion school versus travelling the world with Dan, the boyfriend who had flown 3,000 miles to meet her. The trial run stayed a trial run, and the cameras went quiet after the final episode on October 1, 2023. The real move came later, off camera: in January 2025, on the Unplanned podcast, she said she now lives with her boyfriend — “technically alone,” under her own roof. The FIT application, if it was ever sent, was never mentioned again.
Team Enroll: A Degree Is the Missing Piece
Team Enroll starts with a simple claim: talent got Shauna this far, but school turns a prototype into a brand. FIT teaches the unglamorous half of fashion — pattern-making, grading sizes, sourcing fabric, costing a garment so it can sell. But according to reports, she self-funded Fitclusion herself, and the label she launched in December 2023 now needs outside investors to grow — and investors take a trained designer more seriously than a self-taught creator.
Team Skip It: She Already Has the Classroom
Team Skip It sees the opposite conclusion in the same facts. Shauna launched a real label without the degree — website live, orders open, all on her own money. She built a TikTok audience of more than a million followers under @shaunarae99, speaking directly to the customers Fitclusion is for, plus Cameo shoutouts for income. What would four years of tuition and New York rent buy her that she does not already have?
Their second point is time. Four years in a classroom is four years not designing, not posting, not growing the label. The classroom she built teaches the one subject FIT never could: what it feels like to get dressed in a body the industry forgot. She has lived that lesson daily since she was sixteen. No professor can grade that.
So it comes down to that one sentence from December 2022. If Shauna announced tomorrow that she had enrolled at FIT, would you cheer for the student finally going back to school — or tell her the classroom she built on TikTok, and the label she launched with her own money, already is the degree?
