"Fashion Without Fabric" Event

At the University of Wisconsin-Stout, the College of Art and Design holds an annual fashion show. However, this is unlike any fashion show you have ever seen. UW-Stout's own art and design students strut down the runway in unique fashions they make using anything and everything BUT fabric. This includes anything from vinyl record gowns, bottle cap suits and coffee filter casual wear. One of the most interesting aspects of this fashion show is that it is completely run by a UW-Stout student chosen every year by the event adviser. Starting in January of 2013, I was chosen by the adviser and professor Robert Atwell to be the student coordinator. Coordinating included, but was not limited to, the following tasks: designing, presenting and distributing the marketing material; communicating between campus event services, ticket managers, and catering services; making meetings with the professors and their participating students; scheduling and attending multiple walk-throughs with the hundreds of participating students; answering hundreds of emails from questioning parents, students, news reporters, etc.; hiring reliable people to help with the show (the dj, mc, backstage helpers, lighting services, ticket takers, photographer, etc.); and making sure everything ran smoothly the day of the show.

Each year this fashion show also has a theme. The theme for the 2013 Fashion Without Fabric show was "Tomorrow Is History." This means that the theme was pretty broad, so I chose to go pretty literal with the design for marketing purposes. I decided to use the graphic image of an hourglass to signify the idea of how time is passing to create our own history.

To market for this show, I designed posters that I personally distributed all across the UW-Stout campus and the local shops in Menomonie (where UW-Stout is located), interviewed by Al Ross on the Spectrum West program on the Wisconsin Public Radio, and interviewed by news reporter Steve Betchkal from the WQOW news station in Eau Claire, WI. In addition to all of this, I made separate versions of the poster to promote the event via our campus email, campus monitors, and various local newspapers.