Fashion Institutes In New York – “They were filling suitcases with things to go out”; Parsons staff and students on dealing with the pandemic
The fully international ninth generation of Parsons’ MFA Fashion Design & Society program faces a future so unprecedented that the word “uncertain” is already obsolete. “We will graduate in two weeks to a depleted industry in crisis as international students in the US. It’s a lot to take in,” said Hugh Finnerty. “We have one eye thousands of miles away, and one eye firmly fixed on our well-being, and it’s hard to understand that difference and then look at your work as, how am I going to do this? “
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Second-year MFA FDS students typically spend the first half of the spring semester developing and solidifying plans for their dissertation collections, then the rest of the spring and most of the summer executing them. But after Parsons closed the campus from March 23 until further notice, this timeline collapsed. Students hastily moved their jobs off campus to cramped apartments, some shared with roommates. Program directors Shelley Fox and JOFF adjusted their expectations for the semester, requiring sophomores to complete only eight courses and a portfolio to qualify for graduation. They moved the tutorials online via Zoom. And they canceled the show’s annual thesis presentation at New York Fashion Week. All these changes happened within a few weeks. “It was so surreal,” said Shuxuan Li.
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“We ordered them to remove the walls from all their research, development, manufacturing, anything they could get their hands on.”
“It was chaos. I kept throwing things away. There were samples all over the subway that I then had to disinfect.”
As the closing of the building approached, students rushed to take all their work home. “We ordered them to remove the walls from all their research, development, inventions, anything they can find. They filled suitcases with things to go out,” Fox recalls. MFA FDS Studio Manager, Marla Miles, orchestrated the exodus with program directors. Every other year, she provided a mannequin and a homemade sewing or knitting machine and arranged an Uber XL for students to transport the equipment. However, some also relied on public transport. “It was chaos,” Hugh said. “I kept dropping things. There were samples all over the subway that I then had to disinfect. It was carnage. The New York subway is dirty enough as it is. Add the threat of a virus and it just messes with your head.”
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New York City’s notoriously compact apartments can’t exactly be turned into professional workspaces, the students soon learned. “I don’t have room for pattern cutting at all, so I can’t continue doing toiletries,” says Queenzy Gao, who instead devotes her time to beadwork and other handmade aspects of her collection. “Most people just don’t have enough space to set up a studio,” Grace Her said, joking about fashion students having to cut fabric in the kitchen like they were chopping vegetables. Many students said that the equipment provided by the school was not sufficient for their work, such as Lily Xu, whose collection consists of Dubied knitwear. “Having mannequins and machinery is not very useful. But it looks nice, I think,” she said ironically. “She needs a 12-yard Dubied, and it just doesn’t exist,” Fox said. “If I had known we were going to last this long in this situation, I would have asked Dubied to move to her house.”
“When you’re sad in your bedroom and you’re looking at a pair of pants that don’t make sense, you have no one to turn to, which is the biggest part of what our education is about.”
Other second-year students developed techniques with specialized machines such as laser cutters, heat presses and digital printers. They are confused how to proceed without this equipment. Should they simplify their methods to what they can achieve at home or hope to find a supplier who will offer similar machinery over the summer? “I really pushed myself to explore Parsons and take advantage of the resources available to me,” Hugh said. Its textiles require felting machines, Dubied machines and the school’s computerized Shima knitting centre. Hugh also lamented his lost access to the technical knowledge of patternmakers and machinists, as well as his classmates. “When you’re sad in your bedroom and you’re looking at a pant pattern that doesn’t make sense, you have no one to turn to, which is the biggest part of what our education is about,” he said. “I relied on school so much that now that it’s gone, I don’t know how to move forward. I really don’t know how to make up for it going forward. And not to rely on my tutors, but to rely on the energy of the studio, the energy of the creative body, the people you meet.”
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“We create communities and dialogues through our work, and that’s so hard to do in isolation,” said Samantha D’iorio. “We don’t have people touching our work, feeling our work, seeing our work in that physical and tangible way, which is so important to me, instead of just looking at it digitally.” Samantha also lacks bodies to fit into. “I can’t just use one mannequin. My clothes have to fit everyone, various sizes and shapes. It’s impossible to work with a one-size-fits-all doll. And at the end of the day, a mannequin isn’t even a representation of who you are.”
Chi Han’s solution to that problem is to engineer his own body, a process he willingly began before concluding it became his only option. “I first put a garment on the doll, then I take it off and put it on myself,” said Chi. Working from home serves this process well. “I would always do it before, but there are other people in the studio. No one watches me in my room, so I can be naked all day.” As a result, his workflow became more fluid and intuitive. And having a toilet that fits his body makes it easier to get feedback online. “He takes mini-videos of himself walking up and down like he’s in gear,” Fox explained. “When JOFF and I teach him online, we can watch his videos at the same time, pause them and go,
We can go into great detail.” These videos serve well to limit creativity, but also remind principals of lost teaching moments. “It’s fun to see Chi strut up and down the runway in her own toilet — it really is in a lot of ways — but we want to be in the room with them,” JOFF said.
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“At the end of the [online] tutorial day, you’ve spent the same amount of time, but you feel like you haven’t accomplished what you wanted to accomplish, and that’s mentally draining.”
Online tutorials via Zoom provide these bursts of connection, but require additional work for both students and teachers. “It really doubles our hours,” JOFF said. Each week, students submit photos and videos of their development to Google Drive. Each week, Karen Heshi takes the time to film a friend modeling all of her looks in the making, capturing the details of the garments and “organizing each image numerically” for easy access. Then tutors must review each student’s updated Drive folder before the tutorials, which are now scheduled in fixed forty-minute blocks. Usually the length of these sessions will organically follow the flow of the conversation and the amount of work the students have prepared to show. In the studio “there’s a level of spontaneity — you’re almost hanging out with the students,” but online “everything is lost,” Fox said. “It’s more mechanical, for obvious reasons,” JOFF agreed. And this whole process is at the mercy of various WiFi signals. If the connection is too weak for Zoom, they switch to email. Working longer hours for less satisfactory results was frustrating. “At the end of the tutorial day, you’ve spent the same amount of time, but you feel like you haven’t achieved what you wanted to achieve, and it’s mentally draining. But we don’t share it with the students because it’s not their problem. “It’s not their fault,” Fox said. Despite the obstacles for all parties involved, “the online tutorials were fertile moments of normalcy in all of this,” Hugh said. “Shelley and JOFF have been so supportive (and of course still critical) of all our moves, no matter how small.”
On March 24, the day after the campus was closed, the university’s Office of Student Success sent an email to the student body to announce that it would offer no tuition refunds to students who may choose to withdraw this semester in response on the closing.
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While students praised their program directors and studio executives for their leadership amid the turmoil, they had harsher words
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