On April 17, Salt Lake Community College Fashion Institute held their annual Raw Couture Fashion Show and competition at the Rose Wagner Theatre in Salt Lake City, Utah.
This year’s theme was “Speed: Fashions that move you.” The student designers from the Fashion Institute could decide how to incorporate the theme in any way they wanted into the designs of their collections. Each student had to present seven designs.
Some took the correlation between cars and clothing literally and had paneling on their clothing designs that looked like different parts of a car. Others used a creative interpretation of the theme to create clothing designs that fit their style.
Destrie Strasburg is a second-year student at the Fashion Institute and participated in this year’s Raw Couture. Strasburg picked the names of cars that are also birds’ names.
“I love birds and I love nature. I was thinking basically metal and hard car things are not my style at all, so I wanted to find a way to connect it [my collection] to nature,” Strasburg said.
In addition to the designing a seven piece collection, students had to create an ad for their collections that used original photographs either taken by the designer or a photographer the student found.
Participants in Raw Couture also had to pick a song that played while the seven models showcased their collections during the show. The song was not to be a distraction, but rather complimentary toward the collection of clothing that was being presented.
Nathan Adair, a student who has helped produce the event for several years, said that students used to have just over one semester to prepare for the competition. Changing the preparation for this competition from one semester to two was intended to help the designers be sufficiently prepared to present their collections at the end of the fall.
Fashion Institute director Mojdeh Sakaki said that the event will not be a competition in the future.
“In the future we are not going to make it a competition because the students work tremendously hard in creating their collection and each one of them are phenomenal and exceptional,” Sakaki said.
The theme for Raw Couture, Speed, was intentionally chosen to coordinate with a couple of local arts events that will be taking place over the next several months.
From June 2 to September 16, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts is going to have an exhibit called “Speed: The Art of the Performance.” At this exhibit, 19 of the fastest cars in the world will be on display.
In September at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, the first ever Utah Fashion Industry Association will be formed. The association is the result of work done by the Fashion Institute at Salt Lake Community College. The association will be the Professional Advisory Committee for the Fashion Institute.
