Helping students get into fashion with FAD

Hi, I’m Kausar from the George design team. Recently, I spent some time at our George London office to meet students taking part in an Industry Day fashion and design workshop led by FAD.

“FAD? What is FAD?” we hear you ask! Well…

FAD (Fashion Awareness Direct) is an educational charity that helps young people who are interested in fashion to get hands-on experience of the industry and develop their aspirations, confidence and motivation.

They’re running a series of workshops for 16-18 year olds called Fashion Futures 2, which have been taking place every Saturday since January at colleges in London as well as an intensive course set over several days in Salford.

George is their official sponsor and we hosted one of the workshops at our offices on Carnaby Street in London. The students were introduced to the brand and business, then spent time with colleagues from the design teams to learn how they got to where they are. Then they were let loose to get creative!

We set them a practical brief to create a mood board and some designs for Autumn/Winter ‘11 partywear which was very exciting, but then they had to come back and present it all to everyone. It was a bit nerve-racking for some but a great exercise to build confidence.

Next we wanted to get the student’s creative juices flowing so set them a project to either re-style, customise or take apart and remake some pieces from our spring/summer collections (above).

The students all showed a great sense of style and turned simple pieces into something really funky and fresh. Angela morphed a lime top and denim shorts into a retro jumpsuit and Shanna (above) used fringing to turn a simple Moda top into something much younger. Hamida showed that she’s happy to use lots of colour and styled her knitted piece over a bold pink top with lots of pretty trims threaded through.

What I really love is that they’re not afraid to use a pair of shears!

At the end of the workshop series, there is a summer school that takes place over five days at the University of East London where selected students have tutorials with the fashion degree tutors to create final pieces for a catwalk finale. The final, called the FAD Junior Awards, will take place at Vauxhall Fashion Scout during London Fashion Week in September.

FAD is a great project for us to be involved in and support. Some of the students displayed a real infectious enthusiasm for design and it was great to see them get excited about the brief. They didn’t have long to work on the task and present back to the team, but they all did a fabulous job. They really thought about the customer and their target audience, the colour palette and the details about the collection and there were some great personalities that presented back!

Impressive stuff.