During September's New York Merdeces-Benz Fashion Week, students from the Academy of Art University got the chance to showcase their S/S 13 collections and the results of a unique collaboration with Ubifrance, the French Trade Commission portal. Ubifrance is a governmental trade agency aimed at creating promotion and business opportunities for French companies in their international business development and at putting in touch French-based professionals with their international counterparts.
For this occasion, Ubifrance connected a few MFA Fashion Design, BFA Fashion Design and BFA Textile Design students with famous French textile mills (all of them exhibitors at Premiere Vision Preview Show in New York). The latter donated a variety of types and weights of silk, wool, lace, knits, technical, velvet, stretch corduroy, denim and pigment dyed fabrics employed by the students to create what was dubbed as the "French Textile Collection".
Among the mills involved in this collaborative effort there were AB Creations, Belinac, Denis & Fils, Philea, Sprintex, Clarenson, Sophie Hallette, Solstiss, Deveaux, Henitex International, Philea, Sprintex, Velcorex, Avelana and Roudière. Some of these companies are historical ones: while Roudière has been going since 1947, Velcorex has an even longer history since it has been producing cotton and corduroy fabric for garments since 1828.
The AAU students who took part in the projects - Korkor Apo, Maclay Bowers, Joe Chung, Mina Fadaie, Guiping April Feng, Massayuki Ito, Kyung Hwa Kim, Erica Laba, Eli Daniel Odisho, Liza Quinones, Angela Sison and Wen-Lin Lina Tsai (some of them already featured a while back in previous posts on this site) - came up with a wide range of designs, from functional separates to elegant dresses, from casualwear to formal pieces in some cases featuring striking and very desirable cinematic motifs, florals or metallic laces, proving that collaborative efforts of this kind are the path forward since they expose students to the real fashion industry and help them developing contacts with international textile manufacturers producing high quality materials.
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