San Francisco's Academy of Art University Spotlights Program, Alumni
In the midst of Los Angeles Fashion Week, the Academy of Art University in San Francisco hosted its annual reception and fashion show on March 17 at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, giving a glimpse of the future of fashion design to prospective students.
Unlike many other top fashion schools, such as the Parsons School of Design in New York or Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, AAU has an open enrollment policy. But Gladys Perint Palmer, executive director of fashion, pointed out that AAU graduates have landed jobs at premier design houses, including Christian Dior and Oscar de la Renta.
“Open enrollment produces exactly the same number of really good students, really mediocre students and useless students as the most difficult schools to get into,” Palmer said. “I’m very loyal to [my alma mater] Saint Martins, but, in the end, their graduation fashion shows are no better than ours.”
The AAU fashion show displayed multiple disciplines of clothing development, for which the fashion design students collaborated with their peers studying textiles and prints. One standout was graduate student Amy Fink’s grapevine-textured dress, which used the Japanese technique of tie-dying, called “shibori.” Fink used the same fabric on a black tailored jacket, where it took on a more edgy character.
Fellow graduate student Joanne Hu focused on design, using solid colors in nontraditional shapes as in her asymmetrical jacket and skirt set. For a dress, matte silk and wool-blend suiting fabric was paired with shiny silk taffeta to highlight the cutout edges of the skirt.
Fink and Hu’s collections, along with new undergraduate and graduate collections, will be shown in May at the AAU’s graduation fashion show in San Francisco. —Rhea Cortado
