Last Saturday the student group FAST (Fashion and Student Trends) hosted its Spring 2014 CONTINUUM fashion show featuring 24 designers and 80 models. The show, held in the Krutch theatre in Clark Kerr, drew its largest audience ever for an evening designed to highlight one thing and one thing only: clothes.
Gorgeous clothes.
Caliber was lucky enough to score a seat for the show and has put together a tour of some of the night’s highlights in the runway spotlight.
The runway itself was the first piece of student work we saw that evening. The runway was designed and constructed by the students of the Cal Set Design decal. The class’s students were inspired by Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and used long, taut lines of string as a main element of the design. Dozens of strings stretched high over the length of the runway and then connected to a backdrop at the runway’s start. This backdrop featured a freestanding web of vertical strings that suspended a huddle of cutout panels.
Payal Chinnappa, one of Cal Set Design’s facilitators, was particularly satisfied by the role this semester’s runway played in making the event a success. “As a class, we were really happy with how the set turned out. In terms of aesthetics, we felt that the elements were subtle where we wanted them to be and also popped where we wanted them.”
But then the lights dimmed, the panels lit up with custom-designed projections of geometric patterns and the first model made her way down the runway.
The show opened strong with an Alice in Wonderland inspired collection by Joanna Guo, featuring what seemed to be, to this very novice fashionista, a flattering, modern collection of garments for men and women. Though the texture, sheen and colors of the garments varied, they came together as a collection through similarities in silhouettes and twists of whimsy in each piece’s ornamentation. Guo did an excellent job of bringing the classic characters to life on her own terms without letting the garments fall into the realm of the costume.
Hannah Hubbard’s designs, drawing inspiration from the flower children era, featured a froth of brightly colors and flowers over neutral cream. Though flowers in springtime isn’t a new idea, Hubbard’s designs gave traditionally crafty elements (such as the flowers sewn on to the dress below) relevance when applied to well-constructed, contemporary trends.
Following Hubbard, Megan Riggio’s “Avenge Me” collection re-imagined the classic superheroes of the Avengers. Each evening wear piece was based on one of the character’s outfits. My personal favorite was the Captain America dress which drew on styling from the WWII era America while capturing the confidence of the cobalt blue suit.
“It doesn’t matter who you are,” said Riggio in the video describing her collection. “Everyone can be a superhero, and you don’t have to wear spandex.”
Tina Xu’s floor-length sheer dress with its blue floral print was romantically ravaging. The design managed to capture the lightness of the fabric’s print and material without letting its length make it bulky or awkward. It was certainly a favorite amongst audience members who longed to quietly fold up the dress without anyone noticing and take it home with them forever. Or perhaps that was just me.
Sarah Mount’s designs drew on fashions from the 1920s and 1970s, which initially didn’t sound doable. However, once her collection of summer dresses took the stage, I understood. Mount incorporated elements of both eras into looks that were new. She didn’t try to recreate the clothes of either time, but to apply aspects of each to garments that can stand on their own individual design. My favorites were the white A-line dress on the left and the muumuu on the bottom right. Both perfect for one of those rare sunny days in Berkeley.
Fashion as a form of self-representation took on a rather new meaning when Cory Mohn’s collection “photoslut” made its way down the runway. Each outfit in the collection featured a piece with a selfie of Mohn printed on the garment. I reserve judgement on the actual use of the selfie-printed fabric, but this bold choice leaves one thing certain: Mohn’s collection formed an image that’s hard to forget.
The collection featured in much of FAST’s promotional material for this show was Soazig Kaam’s “It Dawned on Kuaa.” Kaam showed the range of possibility for a bold, geometric print by adapting and showcasing it in tops, dresses, skirts, and a suit. This collection crossed the spectrum in terms of types of garments, but through the use of a shared pallette of bright, resolute colors and patterns, and excellent construction, created a cohesive and confident unit.
Continuum as a theme seemed to be most related to the flow of individual collections. It was clear that each designer incorporated the idea of subtle movement between looks with a wider range of overall looks, but they did so in different ways. The bloom of a flower, the creation of a painting, and the representation of a historical era all acted as mediums of designers’ individual continuums.
All of the continuum collections, as a whole, however, also reminded me of a highly organized collage. Each designer’s choices were unique to their own vision and drew on a wide range of inspirations, but the show was designed to place the collections next to one another and revealed similarities that enhanced, rather than detracted, from the individual collections. They were related like the web of the runway’s backdrop – drawing on elements of pop culture and media, flowers and nature, form-fitting silhouettes juxtaposed by some serious draping, and a definite appreciation for sheen and sparkle. And the variations on these ideas spoke to the individuality and artistry of the designers.
Overall, I was incredibly impressed by the amount of thought, planning, and physical labor that went into the collections and the event’s organization. The products of that labor were sometimes elegant, sometimes, edgy and almost always exquisite. And let’s be honest, I wish that I could add many (okay, probably most) of these outfits to my already bursting closet.
But, according to one of FAST’s co-presidents Ming Cong, all this praise means that the stakes for the designers, models, and production team of FAST Fall 2014 show will be even higher. Berkeley’s latest in fashion can be showcased in an even brighter light.
“I am extremely proud of the show,” said Ming Cong, “but it’s always the next show that will be the best one.”
Photos by Avery Barnes and Hannah Berkman
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