With a colorful collection featuring playing cards, Grace McLain won Best in Show at Kent State’s 2021 Annual Fashion Show on April 30.
Senior and graduate students from the Kent State’s School of Fashion participated in a virtual fashion show to showcase and celebrate their work. Unlike Kent State’s previous fashion shows, this event featured prerecorded professional snapshots and videos of the students’ work. Think Media Studios, an Emmy-winning video production company in Cleveland, filmed the fashion show.
McLain, a senior fashion design major, combined her skills in machine embroidery, hand embroidery, print design, engineer printing, patchworking and upcycling denim to produce her women’s contemporary collection entitled “All In.”
“I made my collection based on the idea of gambling and love, so there’s a lot of playing card motifs and also a focus on the hearts,” McLain said. “I really wanted to utilize that theme of taking a risk on love and it felt very personal to me and it also led to a lot of really graphic prints which I was really interested in.”
Before the show, School of Fashion Director Louise Valentine, Ph.D., spoke with designer Kenneth Cole about his business, activism and advice for students. Cole was inducted into the Kent State School of Fashion 2021 Hall of Fame.
