5 new designers to watch from Parsons’ MFA Class of 2017. Here are some of our selections from this year’s Parsons’ MFA showcase.
The start of the fashion week season has finally begun. From runways shows, to set designs, old and new faces coming together, the week started off with Parsons MFA runway bringing fresh creativity and newer budding designers to the table. This year’s small group features collection from the Nihl, Zoe Champion, Shanel, Shizhe He, Tingyue Jiang, Di Gao, Venus Lo, Amanda Brown, and Caroline Hu. The runway places emphases on colors, textures and an array of imagination, creativity and an apparent passion. Here are some of the top five designers we have picked and loved from this year’s Parsons’ MFA Showcase.
1. Zoe Champion
The wittily designed pieces were in part of an emotional response of how the designer dealt with the passing of loved ones. Mind trick visuals are motifs of the collection, focusing on knits being manipulated in her garments with pieces looking as though falling off from another garment. The use of visual prints recurred in neon-colored jackets, influencing the functions of the pieces as an inseparable unit to the way meaning is constructed.
2. Amanda Brown
Amanda Brown was inspired by the loss of Hilary Clinton during the Presidential Election. The collection is influenced by women’s rights, the idea of equality, taking a white plastic bag as a metaphorical symbol to her pieces. Satirical, cynical, yet clever, the collection focused on the use of fiber and textile manipulation. Her entire collection seems to look like a visually aesthetic collection of a series of plastic bags.
3. Di Gao
Inspired by architect, Di Gao’s collection may seem sturdy, structural and uptight. But her airy version of the pieces utilizes the use of string pulling in order to later the shapes of the garment, transforming it into something else. The collection was inspired by her proclivity for crochet and hand knitting, an inspiration to her overall collection and where she lays the foundation to her techniques.
4. Venus Lo
With her background in knitwear, it comes to no surprise to see a whimsical collection presented by Venus Lo in the runway. Bringing the theme “hoarding” her collection visually sums up what it means to be an avid hoarder, taking her father as a prime example and inspiration to her collection. The textural fabrics and bulky look to the pieces look like a mountainous pile of clothes and fabric were dumped.
5. Caroline Hu
Poetic, melancholic and full of emotions. Caroline Hu’s collection look as though a canvas has been brushed beautifully by strokes of different colors, splattered by textures, smeared with love and passion. The entire collection embraces into tulle where Caroline Hu applied smocking techniques to add laces and fabrics, arranging them to create the illusion of movements of a painting.