HEEERE, KIDDIE, KIDDIE The sign said, “David Crockett High School: Welcome to Cougar Country.” Apparently Cougar Country happens every weekday around 3:15pm, as the Crockett High School parking lot is lined end to end with SUVs operated entirely by MILFs picking up their spawn … and maybe even someone else‘s spawn, if you catch my drift? Not that I know of or have witnessed any such behavior at said high school, but it just seemed too obvious a joke to pass up. With photos and black strips across the eyes.
THE CONSULTANTS This is the 10th year that Gail Chovan and I have volunteered to be involved with the senior design presentations at UT. Usually, the students labor and slave over hot irons and recalcitrant sewing machines to produce a collection for their graduation projects, and then Gail and I, usually along with Patty Hoffpauir and other assorted fashion types, come in and judge the collections for marketability, construction, cohesiveness, etc. After the judging, the projects are shown at what is probably the largest annual fashion show in Austin, with thousands of attendees at the Erwin Center. This year was different, however. It was the first time I’d attended a prejudging consultation with the students. Last year, the staff had instituted this program of offering critiques from industry figures before the judging process (I was seriously unwell last year and could not attend). This year, I relished the opportunity. What’s more fulfilling than being able to share knowledge gained over decades to an avid audience of young designers? This wasn’t American Idol, so Gail and I got right to the point: constructive criticism. Many of these clothes were virtually finished – making our job very tricky. Sometimes we wanted to say, “Start over – from scratch,” but budget and time rendered that impossible. So we elaborated on the well-done points of the garment and then worked to mask problem areas. Collectively, Gail and I have about 80 years of designing and sewing behind us, and though we are often polar opposites in our tastes, there’s plenty of common ground about which we are both adamant: construction, proportion, fabric selection, and relevancy to the chosen theme. We don’t have to like a certain technique to know whether it’s done well or not. And generally, whatever technique is chosen is fine if it’s done well. There are some very universal yet flexible rules. Those rules are the product of cumulative lessons across hundreds of years and myriad cultures. Breaking the rules is great … if you understand the rules in the first place. But almost nothing is worse than having to watch a student painfully reinvent the wheel. And the very worst is when a student is defensive about it. They are students, however; this is exactly what they should be learning at this point in their lives. Often, some trend or another will sweep the classrooms: One student will incorporate some detail that another is using. Suddenly it goes viral and turns up in virtually every other collection in the class. In the past it’s been such things as godets (those triangular panels added at the bottom of a seam to add fullness). Godets in the hands of amateurs can be disturbing, but a wave of ill-conceived godets can render one catatonic. Another year, the trend was hand-beading on charmeuse gowns. This year? Rompers. The inescapable trend in the classrooms at Mary Gearing Hall was rompers. On adults. Adult women, anyway. We saw so many variations on rompers that I thought I was viewing a couture show for toddlers. C’est la vie – if the rompers were well-made and designed, we said so. Another of the prevailing trends was fabrics printed with the students’ own designs. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen UT students develop their computer-printed and hand-dyed fabric techniques … and in previous years, they were fairly primitive. This year, the fabric designs were so important and so critical to the success of so many of the garments, that the sophistication of them was deeply satisfying. Same with the construction techniques. Assessing the construction used to be a grim procedure. Sometimes a garment was so poorly constructed that we simply could not get past it enough to try and judge the design of it. Gail and I, particularly, are die-hard sticklers for using the correct finishing technique for the garment and fabric. We understood that there were certain restrictions due to equipment limitations in the past; this year, even this aspect has improved. Another policy instituted this year required a sewing test before students could enroll. Suddenly, the level of workmanship rose dramatically. So this year? All of these changes and developments have made the consultation and judging process a real honor. We had an intensive preview into what we’ll be judging on April 22, but more importantly, we were given a rare opportunity to find out what was going on in the students’ minds as they designed their collections. Maybe not every buyer or viewer of the collections will know what the designer was thinking, but we did, and it made many things work in new and different ways.
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This article appears in April 30 • 2010.