Almost every fashion design student wants to at least visit New York City, the fashion capital not just of the United States, but also the world. New York is where fashion is happening, particularly during one of our legendary Fashion Weeks.
This particular Fashion Week is a little different: this is the last time New York Fashion Week will be held in the Tents at Bryant Park. The next time the designers and models come out, they’ll be further north in the City. We confess to being a bit sad to seeing the tents go, although we are sure the Bryant Park grass is breathing an enormous sigh of relief. What excites us about this particular Fashion Week is that our student interns from Buffalo State University will be joining us here in the City.
Our big project for this semester is to develop their senior collection both as physical garments to be shown as part of the senior runway show and as virtual avatar apparel to be shown in virtual runway show. The theme of the senior show this year is Runway 3.0, and we’ve been tasked with adding various sorts of technology to their garment collection. We have agreed to serve as consultants in helping with the technical design aspects of the physical garments as well as with the development of their virtual garments and their virtual runway show.
As part of the physical prototyping, we’re taking our students on a day-long sourcing trip to New York’s garment district, there to locate textiles, trims, closures, and other useful things.
We have also arranged for them to volunteer at a Fashion Week designer event sponsored by Nolcha, where they will have a chance to be exposed to an industry event, to meet other students and of course, to mingle with designers and other industry insiders.
We will be doing a lot of in-depth exploration of the technical design aspect of their collections: they need to finish this project with us not only with the mirror collections (physical/virtual), but also with a completed ‘story’ for their portfolio. And of course, we expect them to put together a report about their experiences, which will be blogged over on Professor Elaine Polvinen’s Virtual Fashion blog.
Oh, yes, and while they are here, we’ll make sure we at least stroll past those big white tents. We don’t have time to take in a show, but we can at least take in the energy!
