Contradictions -- Part 1, Planning The Fashion Show

Michelle and I immediately began planning the show. This was not too long after the controversies on campus over the A&F t-shirts that depicted negative stereotypes of Asians, i.e. Two Wongs Make It White and Juice Fong's "The Invasian" piece for the Crimson, an essay which ostensibly stereotyped and bashed Asians.

Eleganza was sponsored by a couple of the African-American organizations on campus, and the majority of the planners and performers were African-American or partially African-American. Eleganza was the cool "black people" show, so we wanted to do an Asian counterpart. Our goal was that it would be more about the clothes and less about the performative, hot-people-dancing-in-very-little-clothing aspect (although of course, we intended to have some of that action to draw the crowds). We also wanted the show to showcase positive and non-stereotypical aspects of Asian-American culture, in response to the aforementioned occurrences.

Producing the show was my first experience in starting something from the ground up, and I learned many skills that would help me later on, particularly for starting my own line/company. We had to figure out what needed to be done to accomplish our vision, and then how to make it happen.

For the show to fly, we needed funding. The great thing about Harvard is that there's so much money available. If you just seek it out, you can get funding for almost anything. Michelle had experience with getting grants from her previous extracurricular experience and somehow managed to get the grant applications in before the deadline (it was almost the end of the school year by that point). She got us the necessary funding.

We made a list of designers we would want to loan us clothing for our show and spent the summer contacting them. Since we were both from the New York area (I'm from Westchester, she's from Long Island) it was fairly easy for us to do this. We were a little naive to think that we could get people to loan us clothes for a college fashion show but through a lot of aggressive cold calling and persistence, over the next several months we shored up several designers (mostly not in our original list) who were willing to loan us pieces for the show.

We created a schedule. The date was set for December, a few days before my 21st birthday. (We didn't want to compete with Eleganza, which happened in the spring.) Then we worked backwards, figuring out when we would need to hold auditions for models, get permission from the university to do different things, hold rehearsals, book the venues, book other acts, etc.

We worked out a general format for the show, which would undergo changes and be fleshed out later on when we returned to campus. We also thought about ways to make the event compelling, making it a charity (benefiting breast cancer research) and deciding we had to make a concerted effort to recruit very hot models. There would also be a student designer portion, where I would show some designs, along with the work of other students on campus.

Once we got back to campus in the fall, our work was cut out for us.