SU fashion design senior showcase boasts personal, handcrafted process
The fashion show for Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts fashion program seniors is usually held at the Nancy Cantor Warehouse. But this year, the 26 seniors will show off their work in Goldstein Auditorium instead. Courtesy of Amaya Evans
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Paige Mathes has lived her whole life with a stutter. It’s impacted the way she approaches everything in life, she said. It’s changed the way she understands dialogue and how it manifests in fashion.
“What does it mean to communicate when you struggle to speak, when you can’t speak?” Mathes, a Syracuse University senior, said. “How can you express the things that aren’t said?”
Mathes, one of the 26 seniors in the SU College of Visual Performing and Arts fashion program, explores this idea in her senior collection. Through her pants, dresses and skirts, she explores how communication isn’t always inherently spoken — many times it’s relayed through art.
Being able to explore the theme of finding her voice has been therapeutic for her, and the showcase is an opportunity that, as a child, she never could have imagined having, she said.
“This is a chance to start afresh and create,” Mathes said. “The world is kind of open to me.”
For the past five months, SU VPA senior fashion design majors have spent late nights into early mornings at the Nancy Cantor Warehouse. Thousands of hours of sketching designs, sourcing fabric and putting together garments will pay off at Thursday’s Senior Fashion Show.
“We all have different inspirations, different fabrics, different techniques,” SU senior Kieran Romano said. “Not one of the collections is alike, so seeing them all together will be really fun.”
This year’s senior class is one of the largest classes in years, SU senior Anya von Wolff said. That means the show, which has previously been hosted at the Warehouse, will instead take place in Goldstein Auditorium this year. Being able to display their pieces on a larger scale than before is particularly special, Romano said.
Each senior compiles a collection of six clothing pieces, all with different stories behind them.
Romano’s wardrobe reflects 1950s workwear apparel with a focus on sustainability and sourcing period-accurate materials. By hand-dyeing fabrics, he learned the authentic practices of making clothing rather than sourcing mass-produced materials.
Von Wolff also prioritized the “nitty-gritty” process of making her garments. Titled “Warped Silence,” her collection reimagines the life of a garment from its fiber phase to the final product. On the surface, it’s business casual clothing, but every piece was hand-woven and dyed by von Wolff.
By sourcing fibers from wool farms all over the country, she aimed to answer the question: “Can clothing come entirely from America?” In her process, she found it could.
“I wanted to showcase that this type of effort can create clothing that you would wear on an everyday basis,” von Wolff said.
Some collections stemmed from personal backgrounds, like Jada Williams’, titled “Salt, Bone and Indigo.” Growing up in Natchez, Mississippi, Williams hopes to pay homage to her heritage and the people and cultures that shaped her.
As a child, Williams found herself drawn to the clothing she saw family wear at church. She is expressing the nature of the Natchez region by embellishing her handmade suits and dresses with pearls, then pleating and burning them.
“It’s very inspired by ancestry, but it’s also modernized to today,” Williams said. “I’m doing this for the Black girls who come from that spiritual, ancestral and religious background.”
While each piece will be modeled as clothing, some seniors experimented with unconventional mediums for their pieces. “THANK YU NY,” Amaya Evans’ collection, pays tribute to New York City, the place she credits with shaping her into the creative she is today.
Her pieces take the textures, sights and senses of urban life and translate them into wearable garments. One of her sets, a brick-looking top and skirt, is meant to represent the architecture of an MTA train station.
Evans hopes the positive energy she channels into her pieces will shine through those who wear them.
“By wearing my clothes, I want to evoke that confidence,” Evans said. “It’s all very bold, uplifting, colorful and very new.”
Though every senior has their own collection, this year of planning and designing has been a collaborative process, Romano said. The whole class has been through every step of the process together, Evans said, from learning to thread sewing machines as underclassmen to realizing their ideas as seniors.
The final “roller coaster” will all pay off on Thursday, von Wolff said.
For the designers, a platform like the showcase is a way for audiences to get a glimpse of their work, as well as the passions and stories that drive them.
“This is like our first announcement to the audience, to the world, saying, ‘Hey, this is my name. This is what I’m designing,’” Evans said.
