SCAD Ups the Fashion Game in Savannah
Designer Blake Smith shows at SCAD
The lights dimmed inside the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Trustees Theater Saturday evening, leaving spotlights shining on the senior style style students’ runway show. The production spoke to the core of what the school is all about—encouraging cross-discipline collaborations: Not only did student operate star, the show was actually produced, art directed, and primarily assembled by SCAD enrollments and alumni. It is this kind of creative freedom that has enabled the school to raise its profile.
The school has shown monumental alter in the past 3 years, with a nearly 16 perecent enhance in enrollment—due in component to the university’s latest recruits: former Saks Fifth Avenue vice president and women’s fashion director Michael Fink (hired three years ago as the school’s dean), Jinah Oh, a veteran of Escada and Cartier (who has helped develop a style business significant), and Carmella Spinelli, snagged from Parsons to chair style style at SCAD. Just three years ago, style was a small portion of the school’s style department, but according to Fink, “President [Paula] Wallace recognized that style was a department that had grown so much, it had to grow to be its personal school.”
Operating out of a renovated Savannah elementary school, the School of Style has now begun to come into its own: A look at the students’ perform is a testament to the benefits of attending fashion school outside New York City. “They have a greater opportunity here to create their point of view,” Spinelli explained. “There’s a definite sense of resourcefulness simply because it’s not as if they can go down the street to locate a button. So they look for option, creative approaches to achieve these factors.”
That resourcefulness also indicates seeking to other departments for new concepts. ELLE spoke with Samantha Shanks and Zachary Sauer—the latter a textile and fibers student, who with special permission from the college collaborated with Shanks to produce a joint senior collection—filled with her patterns and his fabrics. The two now program to forge ahead with their label Egan + Wallace in New York following graduation. “The largest issue is that I got to feed off of the creativity of other majors,” Shanks explained. “We teamed up with the Visual Effects department and furniture design as well.”
Designer Emily Extended shows at SCAD
Also striking is the students’ enthusiasm and savvy—saunter around one of their facilities and you will leave with no much less than 5 students’ company cards. “People often don’t believe that fashion is distinct from other customer organizations, but we emphasize that it’s a entire separate ideology,” Oh explained. “We also prepare them for what can happen when they graduate—who knew that Facebook or Pinterest would spring up? We try to make them discover and connect the dots.”
And although business savvy is an integral portion of the university’s education, creativity seems to abound at every single turn. A brief quit into one of the fiber department’s knit labs led us to Michael-Birch Pierce, a MFA student who draws portraits of folks with a sewing machine. And in the building’s basement, a student was felting wool with a pool noodle.
It was a exceptional environment to witness—a place that feeds off of creativity and encourages the manifestation of larger concepts. Saturday’s fashion show was no exception—digitalized prints, welded jewelry elements, and architectural shapes all located their way onto the runway each a process of collaboration and not just an person train of thought—which, realistically, is what the fashion market is really all about.