Schlosser
Jordan Rabinowitz swaggered down the runway, sized up the audience, and curled his lip in a defiant snarl worthy of Elvis’ evil twin.
The Morristown High School senior generally is an affable guy. But on Tuesday he was taking his marching orders from Asaki Takahashi, designer and organizer of the school’s third annual fashion show.
“I asked Asaki to give me an emotion,” Jordan explained afterward. “She told me: ‘Look like you’re going to kill someone.'”
How to be a runway model was just one of many skills students learned for the fashion show, and for the sixth annual MHS Art & Design Week that hosted it.
Photos by Scott Schlosser. Please click icon below for captions
The art exhibition is open to the public and runs through Thursday, June 5, 2014. It boasts hundreds of photos, paintings, posters, furniture pieces (wood and cardboard), sculptures, websites and videos.
And don’t forget the soccer-playing robots. The computer-programmed bots were a half-year project by students of robotics teacher Lauren Shohen and the Technology Student Association.
These bots pose no threat to Major League Soccer. But they showed promise as mechanized babysitters; Ben Shohen, age 1, and Nora Boothby, age 11 months, appeared mesmerized by the machines whirring around them.
Students in Jack Rizzo’s computer-aided-design classes learned to fabricate plastic puzzle parts, camera accessories, smartphone cases and even laser-fitted, do-it-yourself sunglasses, using a new $30,000 3D printer.
(Jack’s architecture students still build their small-scale model houses by hand, however; architecture schools demand that painstaking hands-on skill.)
Photos by Scott Schlosser. Please click icon below for captions.
Senior Jessica Richardson, co-organizer of the exhibition, learned how to mount artworks in an auxiliary gym so sweltering that gaffer tape did not stick.
For the fashion show, students learned more than runway swagger. Some of the young clothing designers also had to be taught to sew, according to senior Jordan Pohle, who made her own prom dress.
The MHS Fashion Club meets a couple of times weekly, Jordan said, and some of those meetings involve informal sewing lessons.
Asaki Takahashi, a junior who aspires to a career in fashion design, said she was a little nervous running the fashion show in front of its founder, Shannon Kikuchi, who just completed her first year at Parsons The New School for Design.
But as theater manager for MHS stage productions, Asaki has learned to take charge. Already, she said, she is thinking ahead to next year’s fashion show, and how to carve out more rehearsal time. Models only had a few minutes for a run-through on Tuesday.
Asaki’s foray into menswear design began with a bow tie for fellow junior Colin Crosby, as a birthday gift.
“Then I thought, ‘Why not make him a shirt?’ I want to learn to make guy’s clothes.”
