FTD Emerging Designers Showcase

Why is this event important to you/to host?

The ability to create and effectively present a body of work is integral to a textile or fashion design designer’s success, so preparing for and carrying out the FTD Emerging Designers Showcase provides invaluable professional development experience and experiential learning. The showcase event provides an opportunity for our graduating seniors in textile design and fashion design to share their senior collections with an audience beyond the immediate Wilson College of Textiles community. For the college, it provides a venue to share some of the work of the college with our NC State colleagues and the community. It creates an opportunity to share with industry guests and potential employers, potential students, and alumni, sponsors, and friends of the college, helping to keep us connected to these important constituencies.

How does this event impact the campus community?

The FTD Emerging Designers Showcase exposes the campus community to a breadth of textile and fashion products and perspectives. It fosters an appreciation for textiles as a medium for creative expression as well as an enabler for products that enrich our lives daily – from our clothing to our home furnishings to our car interiors and beyond. The showcase also provides a venue for educating the campus community about the complexities of creating the fashion and textile products that surround us every day.

How does this event include/affect the students at NC State? (attendees, participants, funds?)

The FTD Emerging Designers Showcase includes NC State students by sharing the work of the student designers, and the stories of creating the work, with those who attend the exhibit and the runway show. The showcase helps in fostering an environment of diversity, service, and inclusivity by giving voice to the passions and beliefs of the individual designers. Over the years of the showcase, we have had collections presented targeting markets of diverse ages, sizes, lifestyles, and cultures. Collections have engaged attendees through participatory design stories, educating about traceability and sustainable design in the textile industry, raising awareness of issues such as childhood cancer and making a difference, and inviting them to explore their own dreams, cultures, and heritage. As a recent example, one of the 2019 collections focused on adaptive fashion for those with physical disabilities.

How has your event evolved since you began hosting on-campus?

We chose Talley Students Center as a venue intentionally to increase the outreach and audience of our event. Five short years ago when we hosted our first showcase for the inaugural class of Fashion and Textile Design program graduates, it was in the Wilson College of Textiles. The event was much more limited in size, and primarily attracted graduate’s families and friends, and some of the staff, students and faculty of the college. Our second showcase was in Hunt Library, which improved our outreach but still proved to limit in many ways. Since we relocated the event to Talley in 2017, we have attracted a much larger and more diverse audience from NC State and from the local community.

How would you like to see your event evolve as we move into the future?

This year, the FTD Emerging Designers Showcase played a key role in hosting Innovate Textile and Apparel Americas 2019, an international conference, on NC State campus. In addition to providing networking opportunities for the student designers, the conference brought a new and diverse audience of delegates to NC State campus and to Talley Student Center. As we move into the future, we want to see the showcase continue to grow in outreach to the community, nationally and internationally while continuing to enrich the on-campus experiences of the NC State community including students, faculty, and staff.

How can students/staff/faculty learn more about your event and others that you host on campus?

The best way to keep up with the FTD Emerging Designers showcase is our website https://sites.textiles.ncsu.edu/ftdemergingdesigners/ which is updated throughout the year as information becomes available.