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“It isn’t easy when everyone wants to be a designer, now that fashion is pop culture.” ~Steven Kolb, Executive director of Council of Fashion Designers of America (Full reference here)
What does it take now to be a designer? Fashion Design programs are flourishing around the country, from the most well known, Fashion Institute of Technology, Pratt and Parsons down to newer pop up corporation schools like The Art Institute and the International Academy of Design and Technology. Offering all stages of skill development and business acumen, the newly created institutions are capitalizing on the growing trend and desire of the eager, (mostly) young to enter the fashion world. No longer is couture the standard line for high quality, and no longer is luxury only for the elite. These days, couture is slapped on coffee cups, jeans made in China and the hooded sweatshirt for your carryon pup. Easy became the way to go and the global nationalization of the terms has opened doors and windows and let the teeming winds of lust into the houses that were used to store safely these valued ideas. What has been lost however in the airing out of the old ways is the pride and mind behind what the ideas are meant to uphold. There was a time before, and even in the beginnings of the industrial era, where integrity was the cornerstone of a business. Today, profit holds the key. If your main goal is to make more money, you have to do what business requires to do so. If you have to make the numbers fit, you have to take that zipper off there, sacrificing the original design. If you have to supply 500 stores instead of 50, corners will certainly have to be cut somewhere along the line. If you have a teacher, 27 years old, that just graduated from a school like IADT and is now responsible for the education of new students, yet the teacher themselves was taught in a quick-to, cookie cutter, just the basics way, what is the value of what their students now are learning? The impetus on thorough education has through these information-age times, lost more and more of its esteem as people nowadays want it fast, and they want it now. If a little is lost here, a little is foregone there, what is it to them if they think they will get the total package in the end, or if they see their profits rise? The truth of the matter is, you might not feel the nick, but before you know it, you are dying from 1,000 tiny cuts. Your dreams, the body cut to pieces lying on your design room floor. Unprepared, shortsightedly envisaged and passed because the school or company needs the money, is this the state of design we find ourselves in at the dawning of the 21st Century? Seemingly so, but there is hope. There is a hope in the public demand growing and picking up steam in want of quality, care in construction and a knowledge that they as an individual are taken into consideration of the design.
Not to suppose that popular culture has ever capitulated to anything above the lowest common denominator, hence why it is so widely popular, but perhaps this changing of the fashion tides in what is coveted by consumers is truly a raising of the bar for designers. Pushing those that are truly committed, real artists and innovators to reach for new heights in their work and those learning will be able to receive an education that empowers them to supply the demand and together we can encourage couture quality from education to implementation. Nothing worthwhile comes easy, so let us not fret over that. Let’s continue to push the standards that make us great!
Here’s to hoping! Happy 2013!
~Mani De Osu