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“FIT is extremely technical so now I feel like I really understand how garments are constructed,” explained FIT student Amanda Robertson after showing her senior thesis collection on the school’s annual catwalk. ”And it’s very rewarding after four years of working so hard to finally have my work be seen and recognized.”
It’s that very technicality that keeps students applying in droves to New York state’s answer to a federally-funded fashion education. Famous for its marketable outlook on the fashion industry, it was easy to detect the school’s solid design eduction within each of its students’ final creations. “The ideal is to combine the technical skills with creativity, and you really did see how some of these pieces combined the two,” Valerie Steele, the school’s museum director, exclaimed post-show.
In vignettes, each of the university’s design departments presented a selection of their best offerings that were hand-picked by industry judges including Kate Betts, Lilliana Vazquez, and ELLE’s very own Joe Zee. The sportswear selects honed in on a neutral color palette with flourishes of neon or fluted embellishments, while the knitwear department presented a larger breadth of ideas.
“I was most impressed by the knits and lingerie, those two categories blew me away—they were fresh, imaginative, and well-executed,” Fern Mallis said of the students’ designs. Steele was also in admiration, “Particular kudos to the knitwear and lingerie designers!”
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