Earlier this week, New York’s Parsons School of Design held its largest runway to-date, in celebration of its BFA program’s class of 2024. With 275 graduates, the school’s end-of-year catwalk featured a hefty 217 looks, marking its most-inclusive fashion show in terms of participating students. The show was broken down by the school’s various pathways — collections, fashion product, materiality, systems and society, and phygital fashion — with each student presenting just one look from their thesis collection.
Though audience members were only able to get a sneak peek of each budding designer’s full abilities at the event, Parsons has since set live a website filled with videos, images and notes behind every students’ work. Among the standouts, Diego McElroy’s brand Pretty Ballads put forth an end-to-end modular clothing system, in which strips of deadstock fabrics can be zipped together and repurposed to manipulate silhouettes in unconventional ways. Sophie de Leo’s menswear, meanwhile, cited inspiration in all the different textures that emerge from New York City’s sidewalks.
Demonstrating that “there’s never a right time to do anything,” her work embraces all the sparkles, cracks and inconveniences that come from the city’s never-ending construction. Elsewhere, Qianyi Liu’s fanciful fashions are full of nostalgia. Her doll-like creations are the product of experimental textile collaging, where the designer sews together vibrant patches of sh.
