Story Archive

An interview with recent alumna and apparel designer Claire Lumen.

A partnership with Andersen Windows and Doors allows College of Design students to gain real-world experience in product design.

A fashion label is working to bring awareness to the refugee crisis.

New work shows how the building of Twin Cities highways steamrolled poor and largely Black neighborhoods.

U of M student Aalayha Robb was determined to make a statement in a male-dominated industry. 

Sarah Klecker is putting her design degree to work creating functional clothing for athletes of all kinds.
 

Kai Johnson is a double major in apparel design and bioproducts and biosystems engineering. While those fields may not at first seem to relate, she draws knowledge from both in her apparel work.

Ian Harris takes inspiration from his own experience in the plus-sized community. After spending the past two summers interning at Cake Plus-Size Resale in Minneapolis, Harris learned the importance of having a place that focuses on community building for plus-sized people.

Claire Lumen sees the world differently. Since early adolescence, she has been obsessed with the intricacies of socializing through the Internet. That obsession inspired her line of prototype clothing with motion-capture functionality.

In creating her clothing line, Warda Moosa took inspiration from a poem written at the 1991 start of Somalia’s civil war that tore the country and its people apart. In fact, she named her collection SOMALI BAAN AHAY (I AM SOMALI) after a poem by that title, and her clothing literally weaves those words throughout its fabric.

It’s easy for fashion to fall under the spell of stereotype: that it is the exclusive domain of models, celebrities, the wealthy, and then the rest of us. That it involves runways, posing, and flashing bulbs. It does. But it is also much more than that.