Fashion merchandising students enrolled in the Advanced Apparel Production course hosted a gallery in the Olen Hendrix building on Tuesday, April 25 and Thursday, April 27 from 5 to 6:30 p.m. During the gallery, the students displayed the clothing lines that they have been working on all semester.
Each student was required to create a mood board at the beginning of the semester, from which they drew inspiration for their clothing line, then design three looks and create at least one garment for each look.
“They’re all different levels of sewing skills,” Family Consumer Science (FCS) Instructor Rebecca Boaz said. “For some people it comes very naturally, but other people not so much. I want it to challenge them and to be rigorous, but I don’t want them to dread coming to lab every week.”
On top of the three required garments, each student needed to create one accessory from repurposed material.
“When I first started teaching this class, we didn’t do the accessory,” Boaz said. “And then there was so much focus in fashion on being green and sustainability and repurposing things that I decided it would be a good element to add in to this project.”
Junior fashion merchandising major Rylee Quintana said that one of the things she enjoys about the class is seeing everyone’s personality show in their clothing line.
“Everyone has such different style, and you can see it in the way they dress and it really shows in what they’ve created, too,” Quintana said. “Everyone’s line is very personalized.”
Junior fashion merchandising major Renee Dillinger based her clothing line on different elements from three of her favorite movies, including a pair of red pants based off of the red in the 1999 film American Beauty.
“It was really cool to make something that I like and that I came up with, and it really pushed us all to be more creative,” Dillinger said. “It was really fun learning how to put all these clothing items together and being able to create something that was all mine.”
Boaz has been teaching at Harding for 11 years and said that they have been putting on the gallery for at least 15 years. According to Boaz, Brandon Campbell, the producer of Little Rock Fashion Week, and another designer who shows at LRFW came to the 2015 gallery and afterwards asked if the students would want to show at LRFW.
