Wednesday, February 6, 2008

MANIFESTO: IDC FASHION

IDC Fashion is a concentration in Parsons’ Integrated Design Curriculum that utilizes a holistic approach to educating students within the context of garments, identity, media and fashion. IDC is more of an underlying philosophy than a program. We ground ourselves in the understanding that a heightened consciousness towards what we wear, what we create and what we consume will make us wear more ambitiously, consume more conscientiously and create more ecstatically. IDC is constantly evolving and refining itself, perpetually challenging students to explore and understand their place in the world—and as a result, expand their own potential and break habitual patterns.

The IDC Fashion track offers a series of core classes and electives that provide a context in which knowledge is built up with a sense of purpose. The IDC Fashion core classes engender in its students the ability to engage with their electives in various disciplines in an integrated and productive way. This allows for more meaningful exploration and more useful genuine learning.

“The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something.
It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.”

IDC fashion students make clothes, publications, images, drawings, videos, whatever fits their sensibility—constantly and continuously. We create, we share, we perform, but most importantly we have fun. Our mode of learning is experiential. At IDC we imagine new modes of production and exchange, realize them, and enact them in creative ways.

“Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail.
There is only make.”

The traditional fashion design training marks arbitrary points, independent of beauty and inspiration, that designate a work as ‘finished.’ We at IDC view no such points. Works are only revised, reworked, added to, edited and expanded—never finished. We place human existence at the center of our curriculum: understanding what it means to be human, and knowing that what you do carries wide reverberations, is as important a skill as draping. What we wish to do is add a touch more humanity to every part of the process of creation, production and consumption. The result is that the entire process is demystified, which creates pieces, events and interactions that have an expansive energy to them.

“Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.”

We want to pull as much as we can out of as many places we can. It is about sharing and creating in abundance, with love and confidence. By constantly and curiously exploring our relationship to what we make, where we are and whom we interact with, we are opening up the entire process of creation and exchange. Once there is space to grow, there is no limit to what we create and share.

“Consider everything an experiment.”

When you seek to get the most out of your connections and bring a heightened consciousness to them, anything and everything can be considered an experiment—anything and everything is an opportunity to learn. As a result, IDC’s Fashion track is flexible and self-directed. It leaves room for the x quantities—all the variables and unknowns in life. An IDC student has the resiliency to take whatever life deals them because they expect the unexpected. They can integrate themselves, and their skills, into any environment—no matter how unlikely or challenging.

Quotes taken from Sister Corita's Immaculate Heart College Art Department Rules

IDC Collab: Natural Dyeing

Natural Dyeing is the Fall component of IDC Collab: Urban Dyeing Spring class. We will give continuity to the collaborations with external partners that have been established in the Spring semester. IDC Collab: Natural Dyeing will specifically focus on the process of dyeing and printing with natural dyes and plants. It will teach the students a broad range of printing and dyeing techniques, like stamping, screen printing, resistant dyeing etc. We will harvest some of the plants that have been planted during the Spring semester, we will forage natural materials in the city and learn how to dye with them. Other components to the class will be to teach an enhanced understanding of natural textiles and their socio/economic history, origins, current system of manufacturing and a more indepth understanding of the historical and cultural significance of certain natural dyes. The outcomes, products, events and proposals that will be generated in this class will be developed in collaboration with the partners who are involved in the larger project.

IDC Networks: The Gift

In the Gift, students will as a class work on a larger project. The parameters will be set by the faculty teaching it, the specific content, development and process of the project will be created by the students participating in the project. They will work with setting and creating common goals, shared objectives, workplans, rules, different roles and responsibilities. The project will be students led, and facilitated by the faculty. Before registration the students will be notified about the different frameworks that the faculty will offer. The focus of this class is on taking leader ship and understanding succesful projects as effective team play, that lifts the competencies and skills of the individual students onto a higher place. It will focus on community building through an active exchange of knowledge, skills and competencies.

IDC Interfaces: Love

This studio course is a mandatory junior core for the Integrated Design program's Fashion Area of Study students. In this course, students will continue to explore their personal interests as well as the qualities they would like to develop in relation to clothes, fashion, identity, media, and performance. Students in this course will develop aspect of their work that need more in depth support. IDC Interfaces: Love is a fully self-directed studio that requires a high degree of self-motivation. Students for the first time in their Fashion Area of Study core sequence will design their own design brief . The design brief will show a level of innovation of how to translate the desire for the development of certain skills and qualities into a constructive project. The emphasize in this class will be on structuring and mastering of the students' own work process. Students are encouraged to find an internship that will support both their project and the development of identified skills.

IDC Systems: Being Singular Plural

This studio core is for sophomore students who have developed their work within the Integrated Design program's Fashion Area of Study. Students continue their studies of body, garments and identity developed in [Un]Fashion, and will transform the ideas, propositions and designs that were conceived during that class into wearable clothing, accessories, and/or magazines to be sold or exchanged during an event/sales presentation outside school at the end of the semester. Each student contribute using their own skils and competencies working in small teams, engaging with the other students to develop one prototype and one actual sales events . Each group is encouraged to invite lecturers, to propose site visits, and readings that will support the progress of the class projects. We will invite small businesses owners in class to give background to the challenges and the succeses that shaped their businesses. We invite students to question existing modes of exchange and propose alternatives. The main focus of this class is working in teams effectively, we will use different feed back systems to evaluate team and individual performance to help create more insight in each students' specific set of competencies and skills and in the nature of collaborative work.

IDC Ecologies: (un)Fashion

Embedded in an understanding of culture, history and place, students in IDC Ecologies: (Un)Fashion will design with the body and their own identity as their principal site of exploration. Questioning their assumptions of fashion, students will expand their definitions of dress, garment, accessory, costume, photograph and publication through critical exercises and projects for the body. The exercises and projects will include experimentation and exploration with construction, materials, forms, color, and issues of representation; and will be developed through a process of research and making of approximately fifteen (15) outfits in fifteen (15) weeks.