Stony Brook University SUNY Korea

  A team of students from FIT’s School of Business and Technology, representing the United States, developed an innovative retail concept and presented it at the Future Retail Challenge, an international student competition at the annual World Retail Congress, held in Paris April 15–17, with colleges competing from Amsterdam, London, and Lille, France. The FIT team comprised Megan Antkoviak, an International Trade and Marketing major from Beavercreek, Ohio; Prashita Bassi, a Fashion Business Management major from Lucknow, India; Jesse Cabble, an International Trade and Marketing major from Carle Place, New York; and Kaitlyn Hassan, a Cosmetics and Fragrance Marketing major from West Palm Beach, Florida. Click here to read the original article.  

From left: Edgar A. Garrido, Dana Flores, Grismar Bueno, Renata Quijano, Mellány Sánchez, and Aldo Araujo. Image courtesy of MFIT.   When Dana Flores, Advertising and Marketing Communications ’22, arrived at FIT, she had three specific goals in mind: to meet the college’s president, Dr. Joyce F. Brown; to work with The Museum at FIT (MFIT); and to help Latinx fashion gain more media representation. A proud Mexican American, Flores, who was born in Houston and raised in Chicago, had a bilingual and binational upbringing. This gave her a strong sense of cultural pride as well as the confidence to exist in society’s majority culture. During her time at FIT, Flores wanted to create a space where fellow Latinx students could connect, network, and thrive. It became her mission.   Click here to read the original article.  

  Jessie Xu, Illustration ’25, has much to celebrate. She won first place in Bulgari’s Art of Living with Allegra Baciami: Passione contest, for her animated visual celebrating the luxury brand’s bestselling fragrance. Students were asked to submit their own idea in the medium of their major that captures the essence of the fragrance while also showcasing the legacy and heritage of the Bulgari brand. Xu created an animation, which will be used in an upcoming paid social media campaign with additional exposure during the end-of-year holiday season. She won a $2,500 prize and an internship with Bulgari. Alice Chekunova, Textile/Surface Design AAS ’26, received a $2,000 second prize, and third-place winner Ling Yin Liu, Illustration AAS ‘27 also won $2,000. Their creative concepts will also be included in the Bulgari paid social media campaign.   Click here to read the original article.

Angora goats at Van Hasselt Farm in the Karoo of South Africa. Photo courtesy of Frances Van Hasselt.   When Lorenza Wong took on responsibility for the Textile Development and Marketing capstone course, she rewrote it from scratch. Before this year, students had learned about luxury Italian fabrics, working with mills to spin silk and cotton fibers. “As much as I love Italian fabrics, I just feel like it had been done,” says Wong, adjunct assistant professor. Students told her they wanted to learn about sustainable textiles—and she realized they needed to start to understand farming. She wrote a brand new course that focused on craftsmanship, working with artisans, and forging a sustainable livelihood. Click here to read the original article.

  As anyone who attends FIT can tell you, the college is not exclusively about Fashion Design. There are many creative fields that all support the fashion world, and many of these talents are fostered here. As red carpet season comes to a close, we bring your attention to some of the FIT alumni whose work—styling, hosting, and yes, designing—has pleased audiences at this year’s awards shows.  Click here to read the original article.

Cristina Ng Ng, Margarita Ng Ng, Papa Oppong, Valeria Watson, Deborah Won, and Anthony Oyer, on the set of TODAY with Hoda & Jenna.   In celebration of Fashion Month and fashion education, NBC’s TODAY with Hoda & Jenna has partnered exclusively with FIT on a new, weeklong series: Hoda and Jenna’s “Design the Look.” This marks the first time the show has collaborated with a college on a special series. The segments will appear on the show the week of February 19, which airs between 10 and 11 am. Click here to read the original article

Suvino, far left, with the rest of the production design team: Brandon Tonner-Connolly, production designer; Tafv Sampson, set decorator; Sierra Revis, assistant art director; Sun Roller Galloway, art department coordinator; Matt Hyland, art director; and Zed Hamblin di Menno, set decoration buyer.   Work by an alumna for the F/X show Reservation Dogs won a prestigious Art Directors Guild Award. Stacy Suvino, Visual Presentation and Exhibition Design ’08 (now called Spatial Experience Design), acted as a set decoration buyer on a team headed up by production designer Brandon Tonner-Connolly in the category Half Hour Single-Camera series.   Click here to read the original article  

Picture 1: Collect face mask waste.  Picture 2: Collect plastic waste.  Picture 3: Convert face mask waste into 3D printer filaments for making reusable face mask frame.  Picture 4: Make plastic waste into antimicrobial nanofiber filter with advanced nonwoven technology.  Picture 5: 3D printed face mask frame with the nanofiber filter incorporated.  Picture 6: Comprehensive evaluation of the performance of the 3D-printed face mask prototypes.   The worst of the pandemic may be largely over, but the waste from everyone’s face masks isn’t. Now three Textile Development and Marketing faculty members—assistant chair Ajoy Sarkar and assistant professors Huipu Gao and Imran Islam—working with FIT students, have received a $75,000 P3 (People, Prosperity, Planet) Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant to try to solve that problem by developing one-of-a-kind reusable, antiviral face masks made from plastic waste. Click here to read the original article

When Grace Chen, Fashion Design ’96, sees a woman, she thinks of her as being in a story. Through her designs, Chen tries to help that woman fit into her story or inspire her to play her role even better. Chen, an FIT alumna who established her own brand in China in 2009, discussed her design journey with Cathleen Sheehan, chair of the Fashion Design MFA program, on Jan. 23 in the Katie Murphy Amphitheatre. The evening comprised a meet and greet with the designer, a fashion show of Chen’s designs, and the one-on-one conversation. Click here to see the original article  

Last fall, The RealReal, an online marketplace for authenticated resale luxury goods, partnered with FIT to offer Fashion Design students the opportunity to design and create a luxury, sustainable, upcycled coat from unsold items in The RealReal’s inventory. This collaboration is the first time the online consignment company has partnered with a higher education institution. This challenge was created to promote sustainable practices in fashion and give new life to luxury clothing. Eight finalists were selected to design the coats; the industry judges were RealReal president and COO Rati Sahi Levesque, VIP stylist Erin Walsh, and model Pat Cleveland. Click here to see the original article

The 130 members of the Class of 2024 Fashion Scholarship Fund (FSF) Scholars and Virgil Abloh Post-Modern Scholars were announced on Thursday, January 18. Among the winners are two FIT students, Jennifer DeBellis, Advertising and Marketing Communications ’26, and Lily Noble, Fashion Design AAS ’24. FSF awards scholarships based on an annual competition in which students submit case studies addressing a particular theme. This year, the competition focused on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) pillars such as sustainability and circularity, accessibility and community, and technology. click here to read the original article  

More than 225 people gathered on Tuesday, December 12, at the UNIQLO Fifth Avenue Global Flagship Store to celebrate the launch of RE.LIVE, an exclusive upcycling collection developed by FIT students in partnership with UNIQLO to reimagine new, creative solutions for unsellable product. This marks UNIQLO’s first collaboration with a U.S.-based college, and it is the latest initiative from its RE.UNIQLO program, which is committed to extending the life of clothes through repairing, reusing, remaking, and recycling. Under the guidance of FIT’s DTech Lab, three Fashion Design BFA students and two Advertising and Digital Design BFA students from the Class of 2024 collaborated on the RE.LIVE project, from inception through to the campaign rollout. The collection is now available at the RE.UNIQLO Studio inside its Fifth Avenue store. Click here to read the original article.

  On Tuesday, November 28, in the Haft Theater, a celebration was held in honor of Stephen Burrows, Fashion Design ’66. Burrows is the last living designer who participated in the Battle of Versailles 50 years ago in France. (Read a full profile of Burrows in an archive issue of Hue magazine.) The program was organized by Gwen Sargeant, founder of the Fashion Arts Xchange Group Inc., a nonprofit that provides career opportunities in fashion and visual arts to minority students and professionals. The celebration for Burrows featured opening remarks from FIT President Joyce F. Brown, acknowledging his many accomplishments, including being the first Black designer to win a Coty American Fashion Critics award. He went on to win two more over the years. Burrows, who was in attendance, was thoughtful as he reminisced about his career and expressed his gratitude for all of it. Click here to read the original article.

  The winners of FIT’s second annual PETE Prize for Entrepreneurs were announced during Entrepreneurship Month on Thursday, November 30, at a breakfast at Spring Place. The 2023 winning team of Habin Lee, Technical Design ’23, and Mary Addison Davis, Fashion Design ’23, whose company is RANEA: Courage to Move, have created a business manufacturing and selling athletic wear that facilitates proper muscle movements and reduces stress for chronic injuries for both men and women. Lee and Davis, who were chosen from among 96 applicants, are receiving $30,000, along with office space for one year and marketing, legal, financial, creative, and operational guidance on how to build and launch an innovative company. “What’s really important for RANEA,” said Lee, “is to promote and to remember the joy of having an active lifestyle without getting injured.” Click here to read the original article.

With holiday baking season upon us, it’s time to check in with Rose Levy Beranbaum, Fashion Design ’70, the three-time James Beard Award-winning fairy godmother of fabulous baked goods. Rose has written 13 cookbooks, most of them about desserts. She’s known for her “bibles”—on cake, cookies, pie and pastry, baking, and bread—and for the kind of precise instructions that let even a novice produce a masterpiece. After 35 years, she’s working on a revision of The Cake Bible, first published in 1988, and named Cookbook of the Year by the International Association of Culinary Professionals in 2017. Like any good bible, this perennial bestseller is epic. There are butter cakes, cheesecakes, sponge cakes, wedding cakes, and even pancakes. Click here to see the original article.