THE ARRIVAL OF spring, a time for most people to kick back and soak in the sun, is also the season when you’ll find the parks of Boston filled with folks folded over books and index cards, cramming for final exams. For the fashion-design majors at the Massachusetts College of Art, however, studying takes a different form: instead of absorbing chemical formulas, they’re honing color stories and silhouettes. Hemlines replace history timelines, and cries of “Who took my tulle?!” stand in for wails of “Where are my psych notes?!”
These students’ version of a final exam is a fashion show called “Fashion Lab 2001,” held at the Boston Center for the Arts’ Cyclorama and judged by local designers, fashion editors, and members of the school’s faculty. The show is central to the senior projects, which students begin at the end of their junior year. Its concept is deceptively simple: each student must devise one theme and create eight complete outfits that conform to it.
Over the summer, students have time to ponder and research. They draw inspiration from eclectic sources: chaos and cocktails, comic heroes and fairy tales. First, the students create rudimentary concept boards — a pastiche of images gleaned from magazines, books, posters, wherever. Once they get the nod from the faculty, their idealized blueprints set the tone for sketched figures, which are then transferred to cyberworld by CAD (computer-aided design) programs such as U4ria. Like its European counterparts, Mass Art emphasizes fashion as art; students learn that form, function, and fantasy all play an equal role in design method. As the year progresses and students get busy in the sixth-floor studios of Mass Art’s Huntington Avenue campus, the projects begin to evolve and take shape. Ultimately, it’s a dance of fashion-design principles: color balance, fabric choice, and construction.
So how do you stand out in a school filled with fashionista wanna-bes? Strangely, you must look backward to be truly avant-garde. Says Sondra Grace, associate professor and head of the fashion-design program, “The secret is history. Basically, everything we wear has been done, it’s just tweaked for the times. This body that we adorn has been adorned in many ways, so when I see that students have that passion to look to the past, that’s when I know they have it, because it’s a constant search.”
Benjamin Talley Smith’s Entropy collection
That the universe is expanding (i.e., unraveling) is a cosmological fact not lost on Benjamin Talley Smith. His collection, Entropy, takes an innovative look at deconstruction. If you’ve ever pulled a loose thread from a sweater only to free up a dozen more, or accidentally worn a jacket inside out — don’t change a thing! You just might have a Talley Smith knockoff on your hands.
Sporting a well-worn Britney Spears T-shirt and tousled dirty-blond hair, Ben seems an unlikely suspect to lead the fashion vanguard. But a glance at his résumé, which is punctuated with stints in Milan and Paris, shows that he’s prime material to make a big bang in couture. A native of Putney, Vermont, Talley Smith attended the art-oriented private boarding school of the same name and initially came to Boston to study filmmaking, but soon changed his mind. “I wanted to do something I could really get my hands on,” he says. Of his Entropy collection, he explains, “The concept is about turning toward chaos, getting old. It’s less like traditional fashion is supposed to be — glitz and glamour. This is more like someone who has worn their jacket for 10 years. My dad sort of does that.”
The challenge for Ben was not so much creating, but un-creating. “I realized how hard it was to take an outfit I had spent time on and then destroy it,” he confesses. By haunting thrift stores and drawing from his work with Boston-based designer Geoffrey B. Small, Ben developed techniques to distress his line, such as firing fine metal screens to produce a rainbow patina that he then applied rickrack-style to a short, flouncy gray skirt. Other signatures of his theme include thread-riddled hems on dresses and skirts, oversize stitches that dramatically cut their way across a pillowy flesh-colored skirt, visible chalk lines that fringe a fitted jacket, and the trompe l’oeil “inside-out” appearance of an extraordinary black-and-sand-colored wool coat.
Ben already has admirers: his collection won him Boston Fashion Week’s 2001 Design Student Vision Award, and he was recently tapped by Boston’s Platinum magazine, which wants his black, full-length fitted coat with exposed red seams for an upcoming photo shoot.
Doris Josovitz’s Sweet Pea collection
Doris Josovitz styled her very first dress in second grade. “My friend and I took a long T-shirt and put a row of double ruffles on the bottom,” she recalls. Soon, she was zipping through sewing class while others were stuck on needle threading. As a freshman, Doris remained undecided about her major until a “visual language” class tapped into her real talent and desire. After creating a spectacular urban-fantasy frock composed of garbage bags, yellow caution tape, and orange-neon netting for the class, she realized that designing was the way to go. “It was fun and I could definitely see myself doing more of it,” she says.
The inspiration for her Sweet Pea series came only after months of research at the London College of Art over summer break. Originally, Doris had been kicking around plans for a farm-girl-out-on-the-town look (her mother was raised on a chicken farm). During a stroll through the library back in Boston, however, a copy of the children’s fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea” caught her eye. She just couldn’t get the story’s images out of her head. “I had four days until I had to turn in my sketches that I’d been working on all summer, but I kept getting these great ideas,” she says. “I mean, I like to be spontaneous and it seemed a little crazy, but I just couldn’t let go of it.”
Doris’s resulting collection is a fun, light-hearted look at the princess in all her incarnations: rural waif in an artfully tattered sweater and nubby skirt, hip adolescent in low-slung trousers, elegant ingénue in verdant evening wear. It includes a totally surreal seven-foot-tall dress composed of layers of mattress quilting and boasting a huge sequined pea; add a sumptuous, corseted wedding dress adorned with hand-stenciled flowers and glass crown, and you get the picture that this little pea has come a long, long way from her humble pod. “I had to admit to myself that I made cute stuff.” Doris says. “I tried to fight it for a while, but now I’m like, deal with it!”
Others have dealt with it too. In mid April, Doris won the eveningwear award at the prestigious Gen Art Styles International Design Competition in New York. Women’s Wear Daily mentioned her as “one to watch for” in its review of the show.
Kristen Lombardi’s ‘The Girls Get Out’ collection
Kristen Lombardi’s concept, “The Girls Get Out,” seems to cross Wendy O. with the Powerpuff Girls. Punkish, edgy, and bad-attitudinal, her line seeks to answer an unlikely question: if my grandmother’s friends turned into cartoon superheroes, what would they wear? “My grandmother went to school with these eight women,” says Lombardi. “They go out every Wednesday — they’re still best friends. They all have these classic names like Beatrice, Ruthie, Carmel, so I thought it would be fun to make them into action heroes. They’re idealized women who are tough.” Indeed, Kristen’s chain-link-garnished, ripped-fishnet-draped, and skeleton-inspired constructions in vibrant hues transform an otherwise genteel matriarchal milieu into pow, sock ’em comic-book shtick. Think Vivienne Westwood meets Hanna-Barbera.
The dark-eyed, dark-haired Rhode Island native is as sweet and spunky as her signature futuristic babes, whom she describes as “cute with obnoxious clothes.” Her review packet is an eye-popping story told in comic panels about exactly what does happen when “the girls get out.” “Do they pack powerful punches?” says Lombardi. “Are they fighting for their man? Who cares!” The point is, they look good while fighting the forces of evil.
Originally, Kristen — whose résumé lists “illustration, weaving, sculpture, Spanish, and butt kickin’ ” among her skills — enrolled in Mass Art to try her hand at sculpture; but, she concedes, “I have a problem with things that aren’t functional.” Then a summer stint at the Paris Fashion Institute brought out her inner inker. She sees comic books and books about comics as fun kitsch: “You can get away with so much.”
One of Kristen’s primary challenges involved pulling her collection’s designs into a unified series. “The pieces are so different, so I tried to work with similar materials to hold it together,” she says. Hallmarks of her ensemble include bleached denim, stretch knits, cotton twills, and fabric hand-painted to simulate bullet holes. Her designs had a moment in the sun on December 21, 2000, when the Boston Herald published her sketch of a suggested bridal gown for Madonna. Ultimately, Lombardi wants to “make clothes that will push the boundaries” — clothes for people who, as she puts it, “don’t have to answer any questions.”
So what does Grandma think about being immortalized in Kristen’s newest collection? Says Kristen, “She doesn’t know yet. I’m kind of waiting for the show.”
