Student fashion show benefits SNAC pantry
The Taggart Student Center Ballroom was dark as it quickly filled up. Lights started flashing around in blue, green and purple. Sometimes they were strobing, and other times they were just lighting up different areas in the room. Music pulsed with today’s pop hits.
The family and consumer science education 3080 class, dress and humanity, hosted “Re:Play, Fashion with a Cause” on Monday night. Each year, the class hosts this event to showcase the FCSE 3080 students’ designs, said Dr. Lindsey Shirley, assistant professor to the FSCE department.
“The purpose of them creating the design is to apply the elements and principles of design to creating a look…in recyclable materials,” Shirley said.
The cost to get in was a can of food. All cans were donated to the Student Nutrition Access Center, a food pantry serving USU students and the Cache Valley community. The pantry, run entirely by students, received more than 500 cans of food.
The students had to design outfits individually or in groups as their first assignment in FCSE 3080. They had multiple category choices to design from, which included role play, video games, playground, outdoors, music, movies, “let’s pretend,” card games, board games and sports. There were nearly 85 different outfit designs in the show, as well as models ranging in age from babies to college students.
“I went and bought a dress at Deseret Industries, so I went and asked all my friends if the dress would fit them,” said sophomore Cameron Etherington, who won the video games category. “The first one who said they were free tonight, and the dress fit, became my model.”
Different factors inspired the outfit design.
“I was just trying to think of something that nobody else would do,” Etherington said. “So I originally thought of playing cards, then I thought, ‘Why not take it one step further and make it out of Pokemon cards?'”
Shirley said her favorite part of the event was seeing what the students created and also the empowerment of students to walk on the runway and be proud of something they’ve created.
The students had many different challenges while they were designing their outfits and put a lot of time into them. Etherington dedicated 14 hours to his design, and others needed up to 20. There was also the issue on how the designers would keep their outfits together.
“I did not realize how small the Pokemon cards would be, so I used a lot more than I thought I would,” Etherington said. “And I glued most of them with a hot glue gun, so I burned my model’s arm on accident, so that was tough. Keeping an eye on that and making sure that everything went on right, I would say those were my two challenges.”
“This event is a service learning event that brings together food and fashion to raise awareness about hunger and sustainability,” Shirley wrote on her blog about the show last year.
Shirley said many improvements from last year were applied to the 2013 show.
“Every semester is a success,” Shirley said.
Haley Johnson and Ashley Lindberg’s design “Falling To Pieces” was the overall winner of the show.