#fieldstudyexperience

[conocu-blog]

Dearest friends,

Conocu is back and boy, has she got some stories for you! If you’ll journey back to last week, you might remember when my Study Tour class ventured to the Met to witness the beauty that is Rei Kawakubo’s exhibit. This week, we took on an entirely new adventure and got to be ON THE SET of The Harry Show! And yes, I do mean Harry Connick Jr., the heartthrob himself whose hand I somehow got to shake??? The experience was one of a kind, and it was also interesting because the course framed us to think about it from a fashion perspective. Harry holds such a position of power as the host of this show because he is vaguely in control of the viewer and audience experience and can, from this role, make suggestions whether intentional or subtle to the audience. For example, if he dresses a certain way and hosts guests who also dress a certain way, like the two lovely women he hosted when we were on set, this sends a message of what the audience should wear. In particular, Candice Bergen spoke about her side hobby of painting on luxury purses for people who send them in and showed pictures from her Instagram. Harry’s bringing this to the viewer’s attention encourages them to also want to buy bags and be lucky enough to have her paint adorable little animals and whatever else on then. If only I could.... maybe some day! But like I said, I probably would have just sat there feeling completely starstruck and teenage heart a-flutter if not for the course framing my experience in a fashion perspective. But who am I kidding, those things still happened anyways! Going forward, I’d like to try and speak to someone from design on a tv show set and learn more about what they do and their responsibilities in a creative role. I wish we had gotten this chance, but New York has been such an oyster full of pearls so far that I’m sure some kind of luck may be on my side. Stay tuned and maybe I’ll have an update on this when I’ll be coming at you live from New York on probably not a Saturday night. Side note: that would have made an excellent blog name....

[conocu-blog]

The Met: Rei Kawakubo

Hello again friends! So far, I’ve been loving New York and taking advantage of all the amazing opportunities this city has to offer. The biggest one of these is all the museums, especially the Met. Recently, there was an exhibition for the designer Rei Kawakubo and our Field Study class went as a group to visit and enjoy the incredible installation. Kawakubo is the founder of Comme Des Garcons, a very successful and innovative brand that produces unique and designs that challenge what fashion means or can be. This exhibition is important because of this. In such an esteemed venue as the Met, her work is shown as the art that it is, and brings a wider audience’s attention to her work and Kawakubo’s significant contributions to fashion. It makes her work more popularized and well-known, and in doing so, pushes the viewer to challenge their own definition of fashion. Even from the first second I saw the sign the exhibition, I was thrilled and upon entering, that only escalated. The looks, especially the ones I’ve pictured here, were so well-crafted in both design and technical construction. It can be very easy to make avant-garde fashion look cheap or thrown together, but in this case, it’s obvious there is purpose and attention to the ideas’ fruition is carefully paid. Going forward, this is something I will definitely take with me, because avant-garde is a type of fashion I haven’t explored as much I would have liked to, so perhaps I’ll challenge myself to do so in the future, and try to keep the same attention to detail that Kawakubo has in her work.