For fashion students, classroom instruction just may not cut it when it comes to landing their first job and being amply prepared for what lies ahead.
With this in mind, the Department of Fashion Design and Merchandising at VCU has been taking their students out of the classrooms and onto the streets of Paris, London, Rome, Hong Kong and Spain to find inspiration and gain experience for a more fashionable future.
Though the program started its first trip in Paris, this year students will have the opportunity to spend eight days in the fashion capitals of Florence and Milan, Italy. The trips are designed not only to immerse students into the fashion and style of the city, but also to expose and introduce students to a new culture, said Karen Guthrie, chair of the fashion design and merchandising department.
Traveling abroad, she said, is an invaluable experience for students looking to someday work within the fashion industry.
“Fashion is no longer within the borders of your country,” Guthrie said. “It’s extremely global, and (the trip) prepares them for that first job out when your boss says, ‘You need to go to Hong Kong next week,’ and you go, ‘Okay,’ because you know how to travel internationally or even maybe you’ve been there before.”
Justin Castonguay, a senior fashion merchandising major who went on last year’s spring break trip to Paris, agreed. “To be in fashion, you have to be worldly,” he said. “If you want to move up (in the fashion industry), you have to really think global and how something going on in China is going to have a huge impact on American fashion.” Castonguay also added that his experience on the trip taught him that “just because you don’t necessarily speak the other language doesn’t mean you can’t work with all these other areas of the world.”
The annual trips, which have been coordinated and led by Guthrie for the past 12 years, run internationally during spring break and summer, as well as domestically to New York and various trade shows during the school year. The trip to Italy, however, runs during spring break, which means that students will be unable to receive credit for the trip. However, Guthrie pointed out, this has a positive effect on the trip’s itinerary.
“Because (the trip is not for credit), we can combine the things that are a little more touristy. So if we go to Paris, we go to the Eiffel Tower,” Guthrie explained. “If you’re in Florence, how can you not go to some of the best museums in the world?”
However, this doesn’t mean that the Italy 2007 trip will be loaded with plenty of idle time to roam. Guthrie said she’s already scheduled visits to the Santa Croce Leather School, the Palazzo Pitti, the Salvatore Ferragamo Shoe Museum, as well as a day trip to Lake Como’s Silk Factory and Museum, and a designer appointment in Milan, among several other scheduled places.
Though this year’s Italy 2007 trip’s itinerary is still a work in progress, Guthrie said she already knows where they’ll be globe-trotting to next spring break.
“We’re batting around the idea of London,” Guthrie shared. “It’s not great weather, but London is such a fabulous city for fashion.”
While the trips only allow for 20 participants, it usually books up within a few weeks, she said. The reason for smaller trips, Guthrie said, is to help students more easily adjust themselves to the idea of traveling abroad, so that the idea of one day going to Paris alone is not “too scary to think.”
For Castonguay, the smaller trip dynamic worked. Though he had previous traveling experience prior to going to Paris, Castonguay noticed a positive effect on his fellow “very American” classmates who had never been out of the country.
“I remember I had had escargot before, but a lot hadn’t, and this one girl said, ‘I’m going to close my eyes and ask me if I want to have a bite of this chicken, then stick the escargot in my mouth, and it’ll be okay,” Castonguay shared. “(The faculty) really wanted us to try to speak French, try all the new things, try all the French cuisine.”
More importantly, it seems, is for students to be able to understand and appreciate other cultures.
“If you’ve grown up in Richmond, Va., (and) if you leave Richmond, Va., even if it’s only for a week, you learn to value and appreciate the way other people see the world,” Guthrie said. “My idea is to go ahead and talk with people and find commonalities you share, as well as the differences.”