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VCUarts Fashion Show 2021
Each year VCU Fashion department puts on a fashion show to showcase the collections of Senior Design students. The show is produced by a team of Fashion Merchandising students and also brings in other departments from VCUarts to help with things like marketing, brochures, sets, etc.
During my Spring 2021 semester, I had the amazing opportunity to be a part of the production team for the annual VCUarts fashion show. Our team consisted of eight merchandising students, the student director, and our Professor.
Adapting to COVID-19
The 2021 show was a special circumstance due to the COVID-19 pandemic, making everything much harder than usual. As a team, we had to brainstorm ideas for a safe event so that our team was able to actually plan an event and so that the senior designers got the chance to show off their final collections. Eventually, we came up with the idea to create a fashion film instead of a traditional runway show. In addition to this, we would do a trade show to still incorporate an in-person event.
Planning
Once our team settled on the type of show, a lot of time and effort went into planning every detail of the film and trade show. Many classes were spent brainstorming elements we wanted to include in the film and how we expected the overall product to look. We researched many other fashion programs to see what kinds of productions they have put on since the start of the pandemic to see what we did and did not like. After all of the research and deliberation, we came up with a solid idea of what we wanted and created a mock video to show the fashion department what we had in mind. We decided to collaborate with VCU’s cinema department to create the mock video and film pieces from their collection for the final video. The plan was to make the video a promotional tool to attract potential students by showing the talent of the designers, the merchandising students, the cinema students. We had the designers choose a location in Richmond to film their segment in to show the beauty of our city and what it means to them. Each designer had between two to five looks, and to make the film more fun and current, we decided to incorporate transitions to go from one garment to the next, inspired by the TikTok trend that had been growing in popular since the start of lockdown. In addition to this footage, we hired a professional film crew to film the designers’ collections and interview them at the trade show. The film company would then take all of their footage and the cinema student’s footage to create the final video.
Filming
Filming began immediately after the designers turned in their collections and lasted for a week and a half, until the day of the trade show. The production team and I had to coordinate our availability, as well as the designers’ and the cinema students’ availabilities, to create a detailed filming schedule. As with most big productions, things do not always go according to plan, and we had to adapt and deal with multiple mishaps. We had to reshoot some footage due to technical difficulties, reschedule shoots due to last-minute changes in availability, and find models for designers who did not have their own. I was scheduled to attend two shoots but ended up going to four of them to fill in for merchandisers who could not make it. At each shoot, we tried to have at least two members of the production team. We were there as creative directors of the shoot, and the designers were there to provide ideas they had in mind to best suit their style. We took as much footage as we could and tried multiple transitions to give the film company a lot to work with.
Trade Show
The trade show took place at the Institute for Contemporary Art on VCU’s campus and we had the space from 7 A.M. to 6 P.M. One of my primary roles besides being a creative director on shoots wasting a co-director for the day of the trade show with one other merchandiser. Together we had to create the finalized schedule and make sure everything ran smoothly during the event. I also helped transport the booths the designers used at the show to display their work. The booths were made by middle Of broad, a VCU experimental design lab made up of Graphic/Fashion/Interior design students. We had to transport the booths from their studio to the VCU fashion building a week before the show and then to the ICA the day before the show. On the day of the show, my team arrived at 7 A.M. to set everything up, and the first three designers arrived at 7:30. We helped them decorate their booths and got them set up to be interviewed by the film company. While one designer got interviewed, another designer was going live on the VCUarts Instagram page, where they talked about their work and showed some of their pieces. After their live stream ended, we posted it onto the VCUarts story to make sure people who missed the live stream could still see it.