Arts & Culture

A Spectacle of Restrictive Fashion

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It’s less than an hour before doors open for Cornell Fashion Collective’s first show of the 2024-2025 academic year. Models backstage are delicately shoving chocolate Ferrero Rochers into their mouths, careful not to smudge their makeup. Designers are on their knees correcting their hems, sewing on ruffles and even drawing on their models’ skin. There is a quiet lull in which you can sense the animation in each and everyone’s actions. Though stressed, the aura is excited, even anticipatory.

aesthetic

Senior Designer Profile: From Pre-Med in Atlanta to Eveningwear in Ithaca, a Chat with Robin Reynolds ’16

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Robin Reynolds ’16 believes in the personal, the intimate, the individual — and their capacity to triumph over conformity and conventionality through design. Compelled to pursue a career in clothing design as a result of her experiences as a pre-professional dancer, creating and altering clothing for herself and other dancers, Reynolds seeks to articulate wearers’ multidimensional identities and depth, through her luxurious detail, defining surface elements, textile layering and deliberate construction. Her senior collection will feature eveningwear and lingerie inspired by the shapes and subtleties of glass in its various forms. The Sun had the opportunity to speak with Reynolds about her design aesthetic, senior collection, and the journey of her transfer to the Cornell Fiber Science and Apparel Design from a pre-medical track. The Sun: When did you first start designing? How did you end up at Cornell for design?