Fashion students’ designs compete in ITAA

From staff reports

Two WSU students will travel to North Carolina this November as finalists in a national design contest.

In the spring of 2014 Carol Salusso, an associate professor in the Apparel Merchandising Design and Textiles Department asked her students to come up with original designs as part of their final project and then to submit the creations to the International Textile and Apparel Association (ITAA) design contest.

ITAA is a professional and educational association composed of scholars, educators and students in the textile, apparel and merchandising disciplines in higher education.

Every year ITAA holds a creative design scholarship contest in which undergraduates, graduates, and instructors can submit their own original designs. Finalists’ garments are then selected at the annual conference.

This year, two students from the WSU design program, seniors Chanel Uskoski and Kalina Ebling were chosen from all the rest. Salusso also had a design selected for the preliminary round in the competition.

In order to create a design, Uskoski said she found inspiration from an article she once read about “interpretism.”  The article explained that Rorschach’s ink blot tests were always interpreted differently from person to person.

She applied this theory to fashion believing that a person may choose a style to represent their personality or mood, but in the end people may see something completely differently than was intended, demonstrating that fashion is in the eye of the beholder.

Some techniques Uskoski used to create her business-casual ready-to-wear design was painting and dying, which is something she said she enjoys doing in her free time.

 “Always do what you love because it will always be reflected in the final product,” she said.

Ebling took a more sci-fi fantasy approach to her designs. She said her costume inspiration came from Old Norse mythology and Halloween’s Jack the Pumpkin King, as well as the costume in Marvel’s “The Avengers” and “Thor.”

Ebling said she was really attracted to Loki’s costume and the intricate details it contains such as the family symbols and the crisscross leather pieces, which she replaced with ribbon in her garment.

Her advice to aspiring design students was to “draw, draw, draw.”

Uskoski said her teacher Salusso, whose piece was also admitted, encourages students to be creative and also to think without.

“Teachers are always helping you focus and push to evolve from your original idea into something better than you expected it to be,” Uskoski said.

Salusso and Zhao M. participated in a function fashion collaboration to develop a design that served both functional and fashionable purposes. Their inspiration came from the Tibetan people living in the Qinghai province where the temperatures change drastically throughout the day. If it weren’t for the versatile robes that could easily be tied around the waist, the Tibetans would be exposed to feeling too hot or too cold, leading to garment dysfunction.  

The five-day ITAA conference will be held in Charlotte, North Carolina, Nov. 12-16 when the final decisions will be made as to which garments are kept in the gallery.

Reporting by Sarah Cardenas