Otis College Fashion Design Mentor Projects Featured in L.A. Times Image Magazine
Student work created for Nike, Vuori, and Wilson Sporting Goods received a high-profile spotlight.
By the time Otis College Fashion Design students were showcasing their work at the annual fashion show in May, several had already been prominently featured in the Los Angeles Times’s Image magazine, in print and online. It was the kind of editorial reserved for established fashion brands, but this time it was the students’ stellar work that got equal berth in the newspaper’s glossy style and culture magazine.
The article, “The Otis College of Art and Design Students Designing Sportswear for the Future,” written by Samantha Lee, was accompanied by a muli-page fashion spread photographed by Kaio Cesar and styled by Ronben. Image’s creative team erected a cityscape backdrop, against which the Fashion Design program’s mentor projects with Nike, Wilson Sporting Goods, and Vuori were photographed on professional models with a sense of motion. The inclusion of these mentor projects was fitting, as the May issue was themed “Momentum” and looked at “art as a sport and sport as an art.”
Lee, who spent three days with the Fashion Design program, observing student fittings with their alumni mentors, perfectly captured the amount of work and detail that goes into creating runway-ready garments.
An excerpt of Lee’s article is below, along with a slideshow of images from the editorial.
The Otis College of Art and Design Students Designing Sportswear for the Future
By Samantha Lee
Walking down a makeshift runway in a top-floor studio, a model pulls on a translucent, hooded jacket embedded with LED lights. At some point, the room darkens, and the crowd watches the jacket glow — she becomes a bioluminescent creature in human form. Over a microphone, designer Callie Kinnan describes her decision to resew the entire garment in a new material: “The stretch mesh didn’t work. It kept warping when I sewed.”
“Let’s see what it looks like while running,” her mentor, Michelle Kwak, responds, testing the weight of the raincoat vinyl. Around her, students scribble notes and sketch corrections into their drawings: Watch the creases as the model walks. Observe how the fabric breathes as she jogs. Critique the exposed hems as she turns on the runway.
It’s 8 a.m. on a Thursday — much too early to be squinting at loose threads, let alone to be watching a model test-jogging down a runway — but today is the final fitting for the 42 fashion design third-year students at Otis College of Art and Design. And for these juniors, sleep is a luxury.
They’ve spent the last year studying the intricacies of sportswear, and the last three months bringing those ideas to life. For the spring semester, this cohort was divided into three mentorship groups, each one paired with an executive from either Nike, Wilson Sporting Goods or Vuori, all of whom are Otis alumni. Hailing straight from the industry, the brand mentors brought their own vision of what sportswear can be, with design briefs that covered every occasion: elevated everyday athleisure, the energy clash of vintage and contemporary and even a night run to the nightclub.
Read the Full Los Angeles Times Image Article
Read More About the Fashion Design Program
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