Dining on pizza with a rhythmic bass thumping in the background — on May 6, Fashion Club members and student models gathered in F101 to host a celebratory party for this year’s fashion show.  The fashion show was a long-awaited event anticipated by fashion designers and models alike, as club members prepared months prior to create their collections.

Fashion Club kickstarted the fashion show with a setback, initially having complications with the show as two new members dropped out last minute. Nevertheless, the show ended up being successful. Senior and co-president Bernice Lin, alongside with the rest of the officers of the club,  helped oversee the planning, creation and execution of the show.

“We got stuck [on how] models might not be suitable for the garments because garment sizes maybe weren’t the correct size and we had to change around,” Lin said. “Although, I already wrote the model list beforehand, but there’s always those small stuff that might change during our practice.”

For Lin, who joined the club her sophomore year, this year’s fashion show marks her third and final show. Of the pieces Lin has created, her favorite is her first piece modeled onstage — a fur coat made out of fabric purchased from the local De Anza College flea market. Lin liked this piece the most due to how she obtained the fabric,  as well as how it appeared in terms of texture and feel.

The fashion show serves not only as a creative outlet for members to showcase their work, but also as an opportunity for students outside of the  club to participate as models and strut down the blackbox runway. Most models typically went up more than once in order to parade different articles of apparel. For senior Alisha Gao, this was her first time modeling — Gao had decided to model for the show due to her friend inviting her to be a model.

“We would just practice walking up the stairs and on the runway,” Gao said. “The day of the show we had some rehearsals and [it] was quite fun actually.Being in that room and experiencing something I never thought I would do, like changing in the background really fast with the music.”

For Gao, the hardest part of the show was walking down the runway in high heels, as making eye contact while having to pose without looking down or tripping proved to be difficult.

“This was my first time modeling, so my walk wasn’t very good,” Gao said. “It was really fun seeing all the different models’ clothes especially showcased in that way, so I would recommend people to also view it next time.”

Senior Prateek Kaushik walked down a runway for the first time, however he has done modeling before outside of fashion club. Kaushik’s prior modeling experience has been mostly photo shoots for fashion books.

“Runway walks are usually really hard to get [for photo shoots], especially in where we live right now,” Kaushik said. “This is definitely interesting because it’s the first time, even though it’s a really small audience, to do my first runway walk and it was cool.”

For Kaushik, the hardest part of the show was thinking of new poses for each spot. On the runway, blue tape was used to pinpoint three specific spots for models to stop and pose for the audience. While at these spots models were allowed to choose how they might pose in order to best display the clothing. One of the things Kaushik enjoyed most was trying on the various types of clothing pieces. Kaushik’s favorite was a piece designed by senior Danielle Heo that sprinkled  facets and features of Korean fashion.

Most of the people who attended the fashion show were friends and family members. In order to publicize the event posters were posted around the school campus and a formal announcement was made on the speakers.

“I feel like a lot of the work here goes unnoticed for the most part,” Kaushik said. “They’re doing some really cool stuff. If it could be better publicized next year or [have] more hype built around it next year, I think definitely more people should go and see it.”