On a building in Circus Street, Brighton, just around the corner of the university, there is a colourful graffiti of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. Rather than being miserable and sad, the coyote is looking very nasty in it, since it has finally managed to get the incredibly fast and quite annoying bird. In many ways, fashion is as fast as the Road Runner, always dashing after the next fad, but it can also be as perverse as the Coyote, especially when big groups with too much money are involved, yet, when you see the work of different students and graduates, you realise that not all is lost.
Yesterday I had the honour of sitting with Mason Jung and Lilia Yip, both Designers and Lecturers in Fashion at the University of Brighton, and seeing over thirty presentations from the Fashion Design students at the School of Art, Design and Media at the University of Brighton.
Almost all of them produced their own fashion films, while some came up with ideas for photographic exhibitions, fanzines and magazines or innovative objects and products to present a collection.
The standard was actually quite high and the students found interesting, rather bizarre and at times obscure inspirations that went from personal stories from their own childhood or family background to more intricate narratives involving surveillance cameras, manifestos about the state of fashion and empowering women, bravery and the boxing girls of Kabul, Japanese carpentry, disturbing forgotten stories of Budapest as the "City of Smiles", criminals like the Kray Twins and funny takes on science and laboratory experiments.
For what regarded the films, techniques varied with some students experimenting with stop motion, others working on narrative films or developing choreographies with professional performers and ballet dancers. In some cases their energy, joy and fun were contagious even when their ideas were a bit jumbled and confused.
As London's Graduate Fashion Week approaches (from tomorrow until Tuesday 2nd June) you just hope that journalists, critics and fashion industry representatives who are planning to go will manage to spot the real talents and not just be influenced in their judgments by the name of prestigious universities.
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