A look at Marist’s prestigious fashion program

 Sometimes, when you follow your curiosity, you land in a creative oasis. That’s what happened to Melissa Halvorson when she answered the call of adventure in 1998. "I tagged along with some friends who were headed to New Paltz. For people like me, who are from the Northwest," she says, "there’s a real romance about living on the East Coast. Now I have a profession, a career here – one that I never intended – and I feel like the luckiest person in the world."

Halvorson, a knitwear designer who lives in Uptown Kingston, has developed patterns for Vogue. Her work has been shown in art galleries. Her primary job these days is as visiting professional lecturer in Fashion Merchandising and Textiles in the Fashion Program at Marist College in Poughkeepsie.

"I see education as a creative act. In an institutional setting, you can do things that you can’t do individually because you don’t have the means to do them," says Halvorson. As a teacher, she describes herself as an adult ally, a faculty collaborator.

"It’s a really good, unique role. It’s different from a friend or a parent. I help students decide how to handle complicated situations with creativity. As someone once said to me, ‘It’s about how to creatively manage creative people,’ and I think that’s a great concept. If students are working on a creative project and doing well with it, but not great…the project wants great, not good. I encourage my students to go further than they might in an ordinary class. The project wants their best idea, their meatiest work, and it’s my role to get people to feel they can produce that – to know that they can go further."

Marist’s Fashion Program ranks Number 15 in the nation and it is the Third Best fashion program in New York (following the Fashion Institute of Technology and the New School). The Poughkeepsie liberal arts college offers two Bachelor’s-level degrees in fashion – Fashion Design and Fashion Merchandising – and most Fashion students spend at least one semester, often more, studying off-campus in Florence, Paris, London, Hong Kong or Manhattan. Its summer Fashion program, offered in partnership with the Istituto Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, focuses on portfolio development for talented high school students.

 And each spring, Marist hosts the Silver Needle Runway Show and Awards at the Mid-Hudson Civic Center in Poughkeepsie. If you missed the 2015 extravaganza, a glossy 200-page catalogue/magazine (2015 Marist Fashion Magazine, a/k/a "the Book") captures some of the excitement engendered by the collections of 21 senior student designers. Seven esteemed fashion-industry judges and a full-capacity crowd of more than 2,000 fashionistas were on hand for a first look at the work of this new generation of designers, so make a note to attend in spring 2016. "Fashion affords you the freedom to be a little bit grandiose," says Halvorson, "and we have some big, fabulous plans for our 30th-anniversary 2016 Silver Needle Runaway and Awards."

Halvorson teaches Marist courses in Knitwear Design, Textiles/Fabric Science, Sustainability and Fashion, Writing for Fashion and a global trendspotting class, "The FOLD" (Fashion Online Learning Domain), which designs and delivers a range of learning experiences including Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. Fashion writing, like writing about any of the arts, relies on words to describe a visceral, sensory and very personal experience, and the2015 Marist Fashion Magazine is Halvorson’s big passion. "A lot of fashion writing can be cliché-heavy, a little bit soft – or at least it’s perceived that way – so our book is a way to explore with the students ways to make it more substantive."

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