HSE Art and Design School Presented its Collection at Mercedes−Benz Fashion Week for Third Time

This collection by the HSE Art and Design School students resulted from a mutual effort by designers from the undergraduate and master’s courses. The theme of the collection is ‘Klub Zavtra’ – ‘Tomorrow Club’. Students worked as designers, models and organizers in the show.

The fashion show was a term exam for the 3^rd-year students of the Fashion course, and this is why the whole process, from the initial idea to recruiting models and preparing invitations, was carried out by the students and the show curator.

‘This was an important experience for our future designers, who had to invent the concept, organize the casting, finish the student projects, unite them in one idea, and, most importantly, be fearless and demonstrate it all to a wide audience’, said Ekaterina Pavelko, curator of the Fashion educational programme.

The unifying element in the collection was the Klub Zavtra print on clothes, bags and flags, as well as prints with Polaroid shots of designers, models, and everyone involved in the preparation. The same pictures were printed on posters and invitations. The outfits unveiled at the show were complemented with Adidas Originals sneakers.

‘Klub Zavtra means ‘a club of the future’, a community of people who create tomorrow. And we mean not only designers and models, but all likeminded people’, said Tatiana Kossovskaya, 3^rd-year student at the HSE School of Art and Design, and one of the show organizers, ‘The idea of our show is to unite ‘people of one blood’ under the flag of life energy, youth, creativity, and forward-thinking approach. We are willing to carry these ‘flags’, our ideas, our faces into an uncertain, but bright and optimistic future. For the first time, this show included male models, which is very important for us as designers of men’s clothes. It’s vital to see how your clothes work not just on static dummies or at photo shoots, but in movement, on a real person, at a show’.

This time, an open casting was announced for the show for the first time, and every interested student was invited to audition. As a result, 60 students were models at the show, including some students of the HSE Art and Design School, and for most of them, this was the first such experience.

‘I have long wanted to try being a model, since I knew I was tall enough. Friends have told me I could do it, but I never really believed them and I’d never participated in any castings’, admitted Andrey Mordovin, 1^st-year master’s student at the School of Art and Design, ‘When I heard that the School of Art and Design was looking for guys for the show, I immediately applied. I passed the audition, went to a fitting session, and was impressed with the high quality of sewing. Everything was organized very professionally backstage, despite being done by students. HSE demonstrated a very high level of professionalism, as usual. After the show, I watched the video on Instagram, and I really think it was one of the best fashion shows this year. I think no one expected the students to demonstrate such a high level and ‘outdo’ many professional designers’.

‘The idea seemed a little risky, and we didn’t expect so many people to come to the casting’, said Tatiana Katarova, 3^rd-year undergraduate student, ‘Over the several days of casting, we looked at almost 200 people, and each of them was an interesting individual. Participation in MBFW Russia is a huge opportunity that helps us understand how fashion shows are made, to learn from our mistakes, and to practice the things that can’t be predicted in theory, or artificially recreated during the university studies’.

The undergraduate programme in Fashion is currently enrolling its first students to start in Autumn 2017. The knowledge offered by the programme will allow students to work in various areas of the contemporary Russian fashion industry, and to understand how it works.

See more photos from the fashion show.