Life of a Fashion Show model: Part three

Written by Hana Hyman

Photograph by Blake Crosby

This week, rehearsals took place for the rapidly approaching fashion show. Model Tori Dubray of course attended, walking the runway “a billion times,” she joked. The fashion show will take place in the SCAD Museum of Art, instead of its venue at the Trustees Theater. Also atypical is the runway itself, which winds throughout the museum. Whereas a typical runway walk takes a model about twenty seconds, traversing this path will take each model more than three minutes. This trip is so unusually long, in fact, that SCAD needed to recruit additional models for the show, since there would not be enough time for the existing show models to change into their next garment before they were due to walk it down the runway.

Because of all of this stomping, Dubray is thankful one of her looks includes flats rather than heels, a decision made at a recent stylist meeting.

Stylist meetings are part of the last steps in the fashion show preparation process. Each model is dressed in his/her mandated garments, and then the stylist, hired by SCAD, flutters around pulling different shoes from her stacks to pair with the students’ designs. When a styling decision is finalized, a snapshot is taken as a reminder for the day of the fashion show.

One of the garments Dubray will be wearing is one that was not originally fit to her, and was significantly oversized. Luckily, one of the other key players at the stylist meetings is a seamstress. Immediately after Dubray was dressed in the new garment, the seamstress began pinning for alterations. Then, the moment the garment was off Dubray it was on the sewing table being tailored. With this week being the last left to make changes like this, work must happen at lightning speed.

This year, the show is “pretty disorganized,” said Dubray. Changing venues has apparently caused “a lot of confusion and scheduling issues.” Dubray gave an example of this saying, “For the rehearsals this week, I didn’t even know I had to be there until a couple of hours before the rehearsal time, because that’s when they sent out the emails. It was kind of obnoxious because I had to be at work.”

Unfortunately, Dubray was unable to participate at the jury show as she was required elsewhere this past weekend. Insights from that experience can be read in this week’s article covering fashion senior Taylor Krankowski.

Stay tuned for another update on Tori Dubray after the fashion show.

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