It was the second last day of the of the International Orientation, the first year students were tired, we, the interns and the orientation assistants were tired, Udbhav and Andrew were tired but it was worth it. As we made our way back from the Squash and the Volleyball courts we started planning the Fashion Show!

 

As someone who was a first year international student last year I can’t say I was satisfied with the Fashion Show we were shown last year. Not to discredit the hard work last year’s International Orientation team had put in but when I heard that there would be a fashion show I had somewhat higher expectations. So this year when I signed-up to work on the organization of the Fashion Show I already had a vision to what it should look like.

Annabel and I were in charge of deciding the runway categories and came up with the fun and creative options. Creating a Fall/Winter and a Spring/Summer collection idea was definitely smart in retrospect to make a separation between the themes and the ways people would dress at Vassar in different times of the year due to weather/events. We also wanted to go for a chronological order to generate a better understanding and easy to follow guide for the first year audience.

Finding categories for people to walk in was the easy part, the hard part came when we needed to ask people to walk for a certain category or assign them according to the clothing options they or I had. Casting the models turned out to be very enjoyable as well because for the most part everyone wanted to be a part of it and wanted to help out. The more I talked to the interns and the assistants (Udbhav included!) my worries about whether we could find enough people to walk for the show dispersed.

Mostly due to my specific vision of how I thought we should represent each category, I brought in a lot of my personal items for our lovely models to sport for our delight. Now I will not say exactly which ones came from my personal closet and will leave that to your imagination, I must say I do own a few peculiar items.

After arranging everyone and their categories, making sure either they or I had something for them to wear, we were almost ready for the show! Even though we didn’t get to have a proper fitting with every model, we magically found this wooden coat rack that we hanged everyone’s outfits and honestly it looked both beautiful and also felt so good to see everything out in the open. After making sure everyone got their order down, it was almost time for the show to start but I really wanted to have a walk through to make sure everything would run smoothly. Much to my disappointment we didn’t have the time for a walk through so it would be their first time walking during the actual show! Ah!

 

Fortunately (almost) everything went swimmingly, with minor hiccups over changing times where Arjun had to change his look with almost no time interval so we had to send him down the runway barefoot, or when some of the categories went in mixed order. Nonetheless the commentary of our delightful MCs of the evening, Adriana and Anne-Marie, made everything better.

 

Some of my personal favorites were categories like “Mug in the Winter” because we got do reveals entering the runway with big puffy jackets only to reveal into our party outfits, and “Apple Picking” because the combination I chose for Annabel was spot on for a warm Fall look to select the ripest apples right from the trees, “Halloweekend” because Daisy agreed to walk in her EMS outfit while Juliana and Alice sported their best spooky couture creating a juxtaposition of what Halloween has to offer, “Executive Realness” with Sefa and Arjun with their fresh take on interview wear or the “Founder’s Day” because it was just a very joyful presentation with Christa, Amanda and Sefa serving us their best festival lewks.

 

Closing the show was Laura, in a gorgeous purple and blue sequin dress that twirled like no one’s business, everyone from Allegra’s warm spring classes look to Irfan’s traditional outfit, from Keming’s dapper suit to Pratt’s colorful pants looked stunning and the crowd seemed quite satisfied. I did hear days later how much fun they had and I think that makes it all worth it.

 

I would like to thank everyone who was brave enough to strut down the runway for the Fashion Show 2018 and everyone who helped in organizing it from making the playlist to arranging the chairs to emulate the rows of an actual fashion show. Below you can see some of the highlights captured on camera.

 

I hope everyone involved as much fun as I did and here’s to hoping that next year it’ll be even better!

Cheers,

-Ekin

 

Written by Ekin Gülen ’21.

Ekin Gülen is a sophomore at Vassar College and one of the interns at Office of International Services. Ekin is from Turkey, and dreams of living in San Francisco.

Laura Yang is a sophomore at Vassar College and one of the interns at Office of International Services. Laura is from China, and also works for the Vassar Haiti Project.

Juliana Milani is a junior at Vassar College and is from Brazil. Juliana wants to do a PhD and aspires to become a professor one day.

Anne-marie Abban-Demitrus is a sophomore at Vassar College and is from Ghana. Anne-marie has worked as a summer intern for Office of International Services.

Alice Marbach is a sophomore at Vassar College and is from England. Alice like funny bird videos on YouTube.

Daisy Catling-Allen is a sophomore at Vassar College and is also from England. Daisy works for Emergency Medical Services (EMS) at Vassar.