Atelier Improvisé: The State of Fashion at Harvard

Tucked within Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts is a small space Susannah Maybank ’15 calls her own. Equipped with a sewing machine and yards of fabric, the nook comprises one section of a larger common space that the students and faculty within the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies use for a myriad of creative purposes. For Maybank, an aspiring fashion designer, this makeshift studio serves as the site where her imagined creations spring from paper to life.

Maybank is just one member of a scattered cohort of students at the College who aspire to work after graduation in fashion, a field not often found on the résumés of Harvard alumni. These students’ media are varied—some are style bloggers; some are working on fashion-based startups; some, like Maybank, are designers—as are their future career aspirations within the industry, which run the gamut from independent designer to marketing executive. Yet all remain sure of one fact: they love fashion, and somehow, someday, they will find a way to work with it.

But many have found that Harvard itself—with the absence of fashion-related courses and scarce resources for designers—can make it difficult for them to prepare for their future career.

SLIM PICKINGS

Studies of textiles and fashion design have not been within Harvard’s academic domain in the past, which has been understandable given the inherent difference between the field’s vocational background and the University’s focus on liberal arts. But as the college admissions process has expanded to encompass those with more diverse interests and backgrounds, other schools of similar origins have begun to create opportunities for those who wish to work in fashion.
Students at Brown University, for example, have the option of taking classes like “Tailoring” and “Introduction to Apparel” via cross-registration with the Rhode Island School of Design, through which they are given the opportunity to work on their own time with a wide range of clothing production equipment, including sewing machines, knitting machines, and buttonholers. A select few are even able to earn degrees in apparel design through the Brown-RISD dual-degree program, graduating in five years with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the former and a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the latter.

Similar opportunities exist for Cornell University students in the Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design at Cornell’s College of Human Ecology, which offers its students undergraduate degrees in fashion design, fashion design management, or fiber science. In addition to completing classes such as “Fashion Draping” and “Fibers, Fabrics, and Finishes,” fashion students have access to Cornell’s apparel design studios, which contain industry-grade equipment for apparel-making items such as sewing machines, sergers, and, interestingly, full-body scanners. Students are further aided in establishing connections with key players in the fashion industry through the Cornell Institute of Fashion and Fiber Innovation, the mission of which is to “foster collaborations between academia and industry in…fashion design.”

Harvard, meanwhile, has yet to embrace fashion design in its academic curriculum. Maybank was given use of her Carpenter Center studio space courtesy of a VES class in which she is currently enrolled—VES 15ar: “Silkscreen”—but the class is the only studio course that the department is offering in the 2014-2015 academic year to use fabric as its medium. “Although we do have an incredible VES Department, and we have so many opportunities, there’s very little opportunity, I feel, for [fashion] design,” says Haylee Smith ’17, an executive producer for the campus fashion show Eleganza. “And that’s something I know a lot of fashion people on campus have a problem with.”
Caroline B. Hubbard ’17, an inactive Crimson Arts editor who runs a style blog and Instagram account by the name “ThreadBred,” agrees with Smith. “It’s an interesting thing because a couple of years ago Harvard put a really strong emphasis on the arts…but I feel like ‘arts’ is really limited to theater and drama in particular. I feel that it should be expanded to include fashion,” Hubbard says. “There are a lot of people here who are interested in fashion, and they feel restricted because there’s not really a foundational support for them.”

At the same time, speaking on the VES Department’s involvement in fashion, VES Director of Administration Denise Oberdan is careful to draw the distinction between fashion and fabric-based art. “Fashion is not really on the horizon [for VES],” she says. “That doesn’t mean our courses don’t use all sorts of media, including fabric.”

The absence of institutional support has driven Hubbard to enroll over January Term in a fashion course in Florence for the basic skills and training needed to work in styling and brand image, as she hopes to do in the future. “[Harvard’s scarce resources] make it harder to know the fundamentals,” she says. “That’s why I’m reaching outside of Harvard, taking classes elsewhere.”

WORLDS COLLIDE 

The prevailing attitude among these students is that a Harvard degree holds little worth in an industry that is driven by individual creativity and personal connections, as opposed to academic credentials. This reality of the fashion world seems responsible for the resignation that some students hold regarding their futures there. “The fashion industry doesn’t care where you went to school,” says Mirel Baysal ’17, a former Vogue intern who specializes in jewelry design. “It’s purely a hard work- and creativity-based industry.”

Her view is one shared by Lilian Zhu ’17, who started her own swimwear line in high school and continues to design her own clothing while at Harvard. “[Fashion] is definitely a world where a Harvard education does not insert you higher than anybody from any other college,” she says. “You start from the bottom no matter where you’re from…. It is something that has that hierarchy.”

Rather than climb through the ranks of such a hierarchy, these would-be fashionistas often feel compelled to instead direct their energies toward industries where their Harvard degree will aid them in securing employment. Many sources suggest that these fields often encompass subjects like finance or computer science, due to what these students perceive to be a Harvard culture. Asked whether she will continue designing after graduation, Zhu, for instance, replies, “Maybe, but the Harvard pressure to find a finance job straight away—I would love to take a year off and design things, but who’s going to pay for that?”

Multiview Design Sketch By Courtesy of Lilian Zhu

“[Harvard] is a challenge and a blessing,” reflects Lilly Shen ’17, a computer science concentrator who designs clothing in her free time. She adds, “I feel like you’re exposed to a lot of the other skills you need, more on the business side or the technical side…but I feel like there’s this huge pressure to go do something like finance or computer science [after graduation].”

Zhu’s and Shen’s qualms appear to be rooted in a deeper insecurity—namely, that fashion design as a career does not provide nearly as comfortable a monetary cushion as does, say, a position in the leveraged buyout industry. Such questions of financial stability often play a role in pushing students, whatever their interests, away from their pursuits of choice and towards pre-established career paths that are essentially guaranteed salaries upwards of six figures, circumstances to which Shen alluded as she joked of participating in fashion “later [in my career], after I’m not going to be…on the street.”

“Fashion was always something I loved but never thought was practical,” Yasmeen E. Audi ’15 agrees. “It was never something I thought I could pursue as a job.” A summer internship in the buying department of Saks Fifth Avenue, however, allowed her to resolve this conflict, and indeed, many students have found compromise in such positions in the business and marketing side of fashion that place them in a more comfortable financial situation while keeping them involved in the world about which they are passionate.

Audi said she feels that Harvard better prepares its students for these types of jobs relative to design: “I definitely felt like I was able to use my analytical skills and communication skills and ability to get to know people, which is such a huge deal here [at Harvard].”

OUT OF PLACE

Yet even the business side of fashion often finds itself out of place within the Harvard establishment. Last year, Zhu and Kate S. Hoffman ’17 co-founded the startup Revel, which aims to create a platform through which Harvard students can collectively pool and lend one another items from their wardrobes to allow each student access to a larger selection of clothing for formal events or parties. The two have submitted their plans for Revel to a number of Harvard-sponsored competitions, among them the Harvard Innovation Lab’s fall venture residency and the Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business Innovation Challenge—but funding and support, they say, have been hard to come by.

Some of their difficulties, they claim, may be due to a tendency to trivialize the startup because of its association with fashion. Hoffman says, “I was explaining Revel to the people who worked at the i-lab, and I had made a small comment about how I didn’t know if my startup fit in [the Residency program]. And they really just loved that—they were like, ‘Yeah, this probably isn’t the place for fashion.’”

Hoffman’s is a sentiment oft echoed by her peers. “I think that at Harvard people tend to think of fashion as sort of a joke or not a serious thing,” says Lena K. Felton ’17, a Fifteen Minutes Magazine editor and one of the executive producers of the Identities fashion show. “I don’t think that fashion as a career or an art form is very present [here], and I don’t think people take it as seriously.” Hubbard elaborates further on the same line of reasoning, explaining, “To be honest, I think people think [fashion] is pretty superfluous, and it’s not important, and it’s superficial, [whereas] Harvard is a very serious institution, and it’s very rooted in the traditional careers.”

What Hubbard calls the “traditional careers” refers, of course, to the conventional, stable, and well-supported positions in politics, academia, and industry that many Harvard graduates pursue. Those who wish to pursue careers in fashion, on the other hand, have been left in large part to fend for themselves, outside the sheltering arms of the academic system.

YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION

Where, then, can students interested in working in fashion professionally turn for help? Extracurricular student organizations might be one answer. Felton, speaking in her role as an executive producer of Identities, says, “Identities attracts a lot of people who are interested in working in fashion later on because there aren’t any academic outlets, really, for that. So people who are interested in fashion tend to look for extracurriculars.”

These organizations provide some support, particularly for those who are interested in the management and logistics of fashion—but they are insufficient to meet the needs of those who gravitate toward design. Although the stylists responsible for arranging Eleganza’s runway looks are indeed students, neither Eleganza nor Identities currently showcases student design work, instead drawing on the œuvre of established designers for their annual shows. “It’s a lot of work [for students] to actually make the clothes and showcase them,” Smith adds, speaking for Eleganza. “We don’t have the money to spend on that, since we’re a charity. So we mostly try to get outside stuff.”

Raincoat Design Sketch By Courtesy of Lilly Shen

But all that is about to change: Maybank and Felton, as co-executive producers of Identities, have decided that they want to begin integrating student work into the show. “In the past, the show has been more about showcasing really prominent designers and getting a lot of big names,” Felton says. “And while we’re still interested in that, we’re actually going to try to get student designers and recent grads [this year].”

“I want to stress that fashion is not just an external thing. It is created, and it exists and grows here on campus as well,” Maybank adds. “I really want to encourage more student exploration of their own personal and individual style. So I think having student designers would show people that there are people on campus who are very interested in that.”

Such a modification to the Identities lineup would be beneficial for student designers in giving them a chance to exhibit their work. In addition, although students usually lack the space and materials to pursue their creations, Maybank has indicated herself willing to provide those means. The limitations in resources are perhaps the most significant factor in the inability of these students to pursue their creations, as Maybank’s Carpenter Center abode is unknown to the majority of her peers. Zhu also cites an ill-fated visit to Harvard’s Office for the Arts (“They were like, ‘No, we don’t have space for a sewing machine!’”) as evidence of the obstacles most designers face in obtaining the supplies they need.

“If money wasn’t a factor, if resources were provided, I would be making swimwear. I would be making clothing,” Zhu says. But according to Maybank, if Identities begins to accept student designers within its ranks, then money is indeed no object; resources will be provided. The swimwear, one presumes, will follow.

A BIGGER VISION

For some prospective designers, the difficulties resulting from such experiences at Harvard can prove discouraging to their fashion aspirations, particularly given the wealth of other academic and professional opportunities available to them at the College.

“I wonder if there are people who are still so creative, or [if fashion] still means so much to them—but the fact that you’re here means that you look at the bigger picture. You’re not just like, ‘This is my dream....’People have bigger visions, I guess,” Zhu muses.

Her words may ring true for some. But for others, it may have taken the very challenges they’ve faced at Harvard to bring them to the realization that those bigger visions are ones in which fashion is inextricably interwoven.

“I never thought of it as a very viable career option because I didn’t know anyone who was in fashion,” Maybank says. “[But Harvard] taught me that I really wanted it—because I kept fighting to find it in my life.”

—Staff writer Victoria Lin can be reached at victoria.lin@thecrimson.com.