Do it with Denim 2009

I didn’t know about this interesting fashion competition until this week. Do it with Denim, Jeans for Genes Day Fashion Awards – Students reconstruct outfits from jeans and turn them into wearable and saleable piece of art. WAIFT SWAN TAFE has four finalists for this year’s competition so I thought it will be interesting to find out what your favourite picks are. I’m thinking we have another winner here after Leanne Lim’s National win in 2006. What’cha recon?

1. Henrietta Truscett‘s piece was inspired by Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse from the 1930’s.
2. Anna Hohnen was inspired by the discovery of the damaging effects of climate
   change on our environment.
3. Emma Ward’s‘s piece is a recreation of the coral reef, limestone cape and astonishing biodiversity on the West Coast of Australia
4. Cynthia Chong celebrates the past, current and future discoveries of the
   ocean with her creation ‘Song of the Sea’.

I’m torn between 2 and 4. I hear that there will be an exhibition around the country so look out for those in August.

Just as a side note, it’s interesting that I only hear from WAIFT (SWAN TAFE) although there are four other institutions in WA with Fashion and Textile studies. It’s a bit of a battle getting info out of the other places: Curtin, Challenger TAFE, Central TAFE and ECU. Understandably, WAIFT seems to have the the biggest graduate show each year. It certainly gets more media attention than those I mentioned above. Guess who’s behind all this? I’m sure there are a lot of people working hard to make Swan TAFE the best place to study fashion but there’s someone working on this methodically. Pina Ielati, Senior Marketing Coordinator at Swan TAFE is right onto it. The graduate show is in December but she is already busy getting us (media, small or big) involved. I started planning for the rest of the year already with interviews and photo shoots to line up. I’m sure students at other institutions work just as hard but I don’t hear about them. Shame. It pays to have a good media person to get students’ work exposed early on.

Some people still don’t get why it’s important to get media involved namely, ME. Here’s why.

Any of those four students who entered Do it with Denim Fashion Awards will eventually graduate. I’ll cover their design then. They may well get picked up by Perth Fashion Festival that year. I’ll cover their story again with some pretty pickies. When people do searches in Google, for example, guess what gets listed at the top right in the first page? That’s right, Style Discovery! Do you see what I’m getting at? How many times do I have to say to people – Don’t underestimate blogging power. Only those who hear will benefit.

I don’t usually do any blog ‘sales’ pitch in this space but I felt a strong urge today for some reason. Who cares in the end? I don’t even have enough time in a day to do everything anyway.

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