Fashion Events at AUP
Article by Lyla Bhalla-Ladd
Fashion is not a foreign concept to many AUP students. Americans who choose to come to Paris for university is a relatively self-selecting group, and many of our interests either include or overlap with fashion. From personal expression to budding careers, we all have something to say. This semester, the Fashion Department at AUP has arranged three fashion talks, two of which have been in person. I attended them in the past few weeks- here’s the rundown!
The first event was called “How to Transform Fashion Education: A Manifesto Reading & Workshop”, hosted on November 11th. In this meeting, we read Ben Barry’s fashion manifesto, a radical proposal for turning the fashion education system (and industry) upside down in light of the industry’s racial reckoning. AUP Professor Renate Stauss led this workshop, guiding our reading and prompting discussion questions for us to dissect the manifesto and finally apply the theory to AUP’s fashion curriculum. As someone who had never heard the term “fashion education” before discussions with my friends at Parsons Paris, this workshop was my first academic introduction to the field. The material was wholly accessible for varying levels of fashion experience and opened an incredible conversation between the students and faculty.
The following Tuesday I attended was a talk led by Kim Hou on her company, About A Worker. Her team travels to clothing factories and engages the laborers in the process of design in an effort to include those who manually create the clothes in the creative process. Specifically, the company provides these design workshops to marginalized groups such as incarcerated laborers. She presented what the last couple years have meant for a budding fashion sustainability and ethics company. This guest lecture nicely accompanied the previous event in adding the environmental angle to fashion ethics.
These events were organized by the Fashion Club. Co-Presidents, Erin Garry and Linnea Wingerup, say, “The fashion club has been inactive for a few semesters, so we are focused on engaging the AUP student body (both students studying fashion and students studying other subjects) in what topics and events they are most interested in. We really want fashion club to allow students to discover different aspects and ideas in fashion, to learn from each other’s knowledge and skill sets, and further conversations had in our courses.”
The fashion club will continue to put on events throughout the rest of the school year, which I highly recommend attending if you have a free afternoon. They are planning excursions such as: “fashion exhibitions, documentary screenings, promoting the fashion talk series put on by the fashion studies department, networking with alumni in the fashion industry, and just coffee meetups to get to know students with related interests,” says the leadership. I hope to see you there!