Karmin Whipple closes her time at SCAD with her senior collection

Written by Abby Chadwick. Photos courtesy of Kendra Frankle and Marleah Flajnik.

I was recently able to sit down with Karmin Whipple, a senior fashion design major with a fashion marketing & management minor, whose senior collection was recently featured in SCAD’s annual fashion show. If you went to the show or saw the livestream and were mesmerized by a variety of brightly-colored women’s activewear, you likely witnessed the public debut of Karmin’s year-long senior thesis collection. 

When speaking about the overall concept behind the looks, Karmin said, “One of my initial ideas was tennis and its history because I played tennis in high school, and I still play. My professor thought that that was my strongest idea and the one that would be the most fun to play with, so that was the starting point. After that, it really developed into just having a lot of fun with the designs and exaggerating things and just making it really exciting. And then on a deeper, conceptual level, it turned into dressing the future generation of female athletes because when you step onto that court or field, it’s like you’re a new person and it’s really exciting and invigorating. So in the end, it was really about taking those feelings and translating them into fashion and making the clothing represent those feelings of excitement and empowerment.”

Karmin described the entirety of the conceptualization process (the first half of senior year) as a constant defining and refining process, and a constant progression of exploring what story she wanted to tell and how to say exactly what she was thinking through clothing. However, she admitted, “Once it got to actually making the clothes, I think that was what was most exciting. Seeing it all come together was game-changing. I loved finally getting to the point where it was physical and I was adding all of these details and putting it all together and using all of these resources that I’ve never used before. Seeing it all come together into a look is incredible because it’s like ‘I grew this.’ It’s so fulfilling. It’s finalized, and it’s real and it’s so exciting and satisfying and just really, really cool.”

But Karmin is more than willing to share that she didn’t execute this collection on her own. When asked whether there was a collaboration between students, other majors or her professors, she responded, “Yes, yes, yes. I did collaborations with a lot of people. I collaborated with a graphic design major who illustrated and made graphics, like all of the sports balls that are on all of my looks, and I truly don’t think the collection would have been the same without them. I collaborated with an accessory design major who made a bag for me out of a basketball. My friend in industrial design made jewelry for me. And then for the photoshoot, it was a collaboration with all of the models, my photographer, my videographer, the photo assistant and the makeup artist. There is a lot of collaboration that happens, and the collection would not have come out the same if I hadn’t worked with the people that I did. My photographer, for example, did so much. She sourced so many of the models, she had so many good ideas and as much as I sometimes like to think I am relentlessly correct about everything, there’s something about working in a team where people offer up suggestions where you’ll say, ‘I would’ve never thought of that but it’s such a good idea’. And there was a lot of that in this collection. One of my fit models, after the first critique, told me, ‘It would be really cute if you had a wrap skirt that went around this look’, and I thought that was genius so I made one and it became a styling piece.”

Karmin describes this collection as the pinnacle of all the work she’s done in the past four years at SCAD. If she could go back in time and give her freshman self some advice, she’d say, “Even though it’s really hard, it’s really all going to be worth it, it’s all going to pay off. And people are not as mean as you think they are when you first step into that building. I remember being a freshman and stepping into Eckberg for the first time and being so overwhelmed and intimidated, and then at some point last quarter, I was just sitting on one of the benches in there and I was talking to other students, and I was talking to some professors and I just thought, ‘I am currently who I looked at four years ago and thought that it could never be me’. And lastly, take advantage of the time that you have here because it went by really fast.”

For more of Karmin Whipple’s work, check out @k.art.min on Instagram and her website, kwhipple.myportfolio.com.