Each year, the Stephens College Fashion Program comes together to bring The Collections Fashion Show to life. Underpinning this process is theme development and branding around which the show revolves. Exploring the way fashion skirts the edges between fantasy and reality, this year’s show focuses on illusions.

As society and fashion merge physical and digital realities to create “phygital” experiences, we come closer to fantasy becoming our reality. With our posters this year, we wanted to combine handmade and digital elements to reflect the phygital illusions we live in. This theme challenges us to go beyond tradition, to try new ways of reaching our community. Therefore, we chose to have three posters to convey the complexity and diversity of the illusions we create for ourselves.

To start, the fashion show production class and a digital film major, Morgan McCall, had a photoshoot with three different models, all of whom represent a snapshot of the diversity in the Stephens College community. After the photoshoot, our team passed along the photos and a vision board to the Principles of Communication Design class at Stephens College, allowing them to use their expertise to create a variety of posters that reflected our vision. After weeks of collaboration, meetings, and creating, the posters were chosen. Alana Weidman designed the final posters.

“I felt very honored to have been tasked with this project and honored that my art was chosen by another group of artists,” Weidman said. “Being a Communication Design Minor, this really bolstered my confidence in my design skills and taught me so much.”