<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"   Designer Blake Smith shows at SCAD  The lights dimmed inside the Savannah College of Art and Design&amp;#039;s Trustees Theater Saturday evening, leaving spotlights shining on their senior fashion design students&amp;#039; runway show. The production spoke to the core of what the school is all about\u2014an encouragement of cross-discipline collaborations. Not only was student work the main event, but the show was actually produced, art directed, and primarily assembled by SCAD enrollments and alumni. It&amp;#039;s this kind of creative freedom that has enabled the school to raise its profile. SCAD has shown monumental change in the past three years, with a nearly 16 percent increase in enrollment\u2014due in part to the university&amp;#039;s recent recruits: former Saks Fifth Avenue vice president and women&amp;#039;s fashion director Michael Fink (hired three years ago as the school&amp;#039;s dean), Jinah Oh, a veteran of Escada and Cartier (who has helped develop a fashion business major), and Carmella Spinelli, snagged from Parsons to chair the department&amp;#039;s fashion design program. Just three years ago, fashion was a small portion of the school&amp;#039;s design department, but according to Fink, &amp;quot;President [Paula] Wallace recognized that fashion was a department that had grown so much, it had to become its own school.&amp;quot; Operating out of a renovated Savannah elementary school, the School of Fashion has now come into its own, and a look at the students&amp;#039; work is a testament to the advantages of attending fashion school outside New York City. &amp;quot;They have a better chance here to develop their point of view,&amp;quot; Spinelli explained. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a definite sense of resourcefulness\u2014because it&amp;#039;s not as if they can go down the street to find a button\u2014so they look for alternative, creative ways to accomplish these things.&amp;quot; That resourcefulness also means looking to other departments for new ideas. ELLE spoke with Samantha Shanks and Zachary Sauer\u2014the latter a textile and fibers student, who with special permission from the college collaborated with Shanks on a joint senior collection filled with her designs and his fabrics. The two now plan to forge ahead with their label Egan + Wallace in New York after graduation. &amp;quot;The biggest thing is that I got to feed off of the creativity of other majors,&amp;quot; Shanks explained. &amp;quot;We teamed up with the Visual Effects department and furniture design as well.&amp;quot;   Designer Emily Long shows at SCAD  Also striking is the students&amp;#039; sharp sense of enthusiasm\u2014saunter around one of their facilities and you will leave with no less than five students&amp;#039; business cards. &amp;quot;People often don&amp;#039;t think that fashion is different from other consumer businesses, but we emphasize that it&amp;#039;s a whole separate ideology,&amp;quot; Oh explained. &amp;quot;We also prepare them for what can happen when they graduate\u2014who knew that Facebook or Pinterest would spring up? We try to make them learn and connect the dots.&amp;quot; And while business savvy is an integral part of the university&amp;#039;s education, creativity seems to abound at every turn. A brief stop into one of the fiber department&amp;#039;s knit labs led us to Michael-Birch Pierce, a MFA student who uses a sewing machine to draw people&amp;#039;s portraits. And in the building&amp;#039;s basement, a student was felting wool with a pool noodle. It was a remarkable environment to witness\u2014a place that feeds off of creativity and encourages the manifestation of bigger ideas. Saturday&amp;#039;s fashion show was no exception. Digitalized prints, welded jewelry elements, and architectural shapes all found their way onto the runway, each a process of collaboration and not just an individual train of thought\u2014which, realistically, is what the fashion industry is truly all about. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/news/a21675/scad-ups-the-fashion-game-in-savannah-42855/?src=global_footer>