Every year, Baylor’s apparel design department puts on an end-of-the-year fashion show to showcase the graduating seniors’ collections that they have been working on all semester.
This year, the annual Baylor Fashion Show will be held at 3 p.m. Sunday in the Barfield Drawing Room at the Bill Daniel Student Center.
“The Baylor Fashion Show is a celebration,” said Dr. Lorynn Divita, associate professor of family and consumer sciences. “It recognizes the hard work and dedication of our design students who get to display their creativity and their technical skills that they’ve obtained after four long years at Baylor.”
Divita also said the fashion show gives the apparel design and apparel merchandising students a chance to plan and execute a large-scale event.
She says that everything – the theme, music selection, props, and even hair and makeup – is conceptualized and implemented by the students.
Flower Mound senior Destany Porter said she is most excited to see her collection and those of the other designers come to life.
“We’ve all worked so hard and basically never slept, so I’m very excited to see what we have achieved walk the runway,” Porter said.
Each designer is required to produce at least five pieces for the show. Some designers, such as Raleigh, N.C., senior Dannielle Davis, chose to create larger collections. Davis said she has 10 pieces in her collection.
For the pieces in the collection, the designers used different inspirations to create themes in their pieces that make them both unique and able to stand together as a collection. For Porter, her inspiration came from “God’s creation.”
“I was inspired by all the different textures and colors in creation and tried to incorporate that into each piece,” Porter said. “Each look in my collection represents a different aspect of creation, such as winter wonderland and the Amazon.”
For Davis, her collection’s inspiration came from a dream.
“I had a dream about bees, and I know it sounds a little weird, but people were getting stung by bees, and it’s like I could see the venom of the sting,” Davis said. “It’s like the dark side of the honeybee and how they can sting people. Some people think that they are cute, but they are not.”
The Baylor Fashion Show isn’t just about the design students, though. Divita shared that the fashion show uses students from all across campus.
“We have a sophomore from the theater arts department that will be reciting poetry at the show,” said Divita. “We have two videographers from the film and digital media department that filmed the senior designers’ collections, and our DJ even comes from the biology department.”
Because this is a fashion show focused on the work of the senior apparel design students, this will be the last time many of them will showcase their pieces at Baylor. Divita said she hopes the seniors have all learned how to develop their own individual aesthetic.
“Fashion is not purely art. It is an applied art, and it is important to make beautiful clothes, but they also have to be wearable and meet the needs of the customers,” Divita said. “I hope that, in addition to technical skills, these students will be able to convey their point of view while attracting customers at the same time.”
