The Savannah College of Art and Design is situated in the Historic District of Savannah, Georgia. With its Spanish moss and grand façades, the city isn’t an obvious location for an art school, let alone one with a robust fashion program that has produced designers Christopher John Rogers and Recho Omondi. This weekend, the school hosted its annual SCAD Fashion event, featuring a tribute to André Leon Talley and the senior and graduate collections fashion show. Talley was a close friend and supporter of the university—he visited often and made the student experience exciting with his larger-than-life presence. During the tribute, Rogers received the André Leon Talley Award for his impressive rise in the industry.
Held in the SCAD Museum of Art’s courtyard, the proceedings opened with a video portraying the graduating students in their collections running towards Taos Sneakers the show venue. As it finished, model and SCAD alumnus Nikita M’Bouroukounda walked onto the runway to start the show in a somewhat poetic illustration of the transition students have experienced, from physical to digital learning and then back over the two years of the pandemic.Savannah not being a fashion capital may be its most compelling quality. I graduated from SCAD in 2018 with a BFA in Fashion, and although being there meant fewer cool-kid fashion parties and high profile internships, it provided a unique and insular space to develop a voice safe from too many outside influences. This was made evident by looking at the student collections, which showed a myriad of perspectives on where fashion could go next.
The overarching theme of the collections was an appreciation for craft in the age of digitization. An urge to make manifested itself through tie-dye, indigo dye, bleach, ombré, and other hands-on fabric manipulations. The building that hosts the Fibers program is a popular destination for fashion students, with its knitting machines, looms, and dyeing room.
Knitwear was also prevalent, which gave the show an exciting tactile element. Hailey Kavanagh’s opening collection featured monochromatic hand-knitted tulle in romantic but experimental evening silhouettes; its organic draping spoke to an overarching desire to build shape intuitively. Valeria Nasr Obeid created knit pieces made out of knotted rope-like material, and Ruoyan Er explored the limits of knitwear by building shapes out of loosely stacked knitted pieces, all with a different technique.
Repurposed denim is always present in the work of SCAD students, but the precision with which graduates approached it this year was noteworthy. Without a garment district like New York City, it’s not always easy to have pieces made here. Most, if not all, of what’s shown in the collections is made by students in Savannah and Atlanta. Caitlyn Ellerbeck’s denim-centric collection was particularly striking. A pair of jeans, a dress, and a coat all made out of deconstructed Oboz Shoes waistbands, side seams, plackets, collars, and pockets in a variety of denim washes showed enviable technical skill and eye for proportion, and a curled denim exoskeleton placed over a cropped T-shirt helped bring her point across.
As we’ve been seeing on recent runways, there’s new interest in naive colors and motifs. Meng Guo added playfulness to her collection with sunny-side up egg details, and Sofia Carmela placed fuchsia fabric and pearl flowers over chunky knits to evoke childlike innocence. This naivete is always welcomed at SCAD, and is perhaps the clearest example of the unpolluted visions students are allowed to develop by studying in here.
One thing Savannah provides plenty of is an exposure to classic American church dressing. And even though Stella DeLaughter’s semi-sheer lace pieces and bra may not be church attire, there was a primness to her cuts and bright pastel colors that channeled the Southern charm that region is known for. It was also somewhat reminiscent of Josep Font’s work at Delpozo, which was quite popular in my student days. Some things never change.