Britt & Missy: Seasoned commuters coming back from their event at NY Fashion Week.
Our student interns, Brittany and Melissa, arrived at Poughkeepsie station via Amtrak on Wednesday, February 10th for a four-day experiential. Britt and Missy are students at Buffalo State University, interning with Fashion Research Institute. They’ve been working with us since their Fashion CAD course in Spring 2009. Their professor, Elaine Polvinen, has been instrumental in helping Britt and Missy get the days off from their regular classes to come to New York City and have the opportunity for first-hand apparel industry exposure.
We’re working on a special project with Britt and Missy this semester. We are helping them take their real life, senior fashion collection, which we are helping them develop for their senior runway show (Runway 3.0). We will then help them develop the same collection as virtual fashion in OpenSim where they will show it on programmed models in a special runway setting. We invited them to New York to source for their real life collection.
We had a full line-up of activities planned for them, not just sourcing, and we also built in a bit of down time. On Wednesday afternoon we worked on collection development for their senior runway show and drilled into their portfolio development. After spending several hours sketching and planning, we were ready for a break: appetizers of baked brie, bacon-wrapped filet mignon, & scampi and raspberry martinis in front of the fireplace.
Thursday was a big (and long) day for them. We had arranged for them to work at a New York Fashion Week event sponsored by Nolcha Fashion Business Services. Kerry Bannigan, CEO of Nolcha was instrumental in helping us to arrange this for them. It was a typically long fashion day: they had to leave our home in the lower Hudson Valley at 5:30 in order to be on site by 8 am; at the end of their day we picked them up at the station at 11:37 pm.
They were providing a range of services at Nolcha’s event, held at the Bo Concept Studio on West 18th Street: acting as a product spokesmodels, serving drinks, stuffing swag bags, and generally assisting the designers at the event to get set up and help display their work to the visitors at the event.
At the end of the day, they were very happy to come back to snacks and treats. Lessons learned: how to commute (toasted bagels with a schmear of cream cheese, go-cups of coffee, have your ticket ready); how to navigate the subway system; Avenues run north and south, streets run east and west; traffic heads north on the even avenues, south on the odd; that the trains in New York leave on time and wait for no man, woman or intern; fashion seems very glamorous, but there are actually a lot of long hard hours involved. All good lessons, some of which we would use on Day 3. More about that later. For now, pictures from the visit.
Britt
Missy
Not too tired to vogue!
Britt & Missy in the Fashion District on 7th Avenue
