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"  Jason Wu at his Fall 2014 show; Wu on the Met Gala red carpet with ELLE cover girl Dakota Johnson; Michelle Obama in Wu&amp;#039;s design. Long before Project Runway turned the Parsons The New School for Design into a reality TV hub, the New York fashion school lured major talents to its notoriously tough classes. &amp;quot;There was an ad for Parsons on the back of my babysitter&amp;#039;s &amp;#039;Seventeen Magazine&amp;#039;,&amp;quot; said Anna Sui at last night&amp;#039;s gala for the New York design school. &amp;quot;So even as a little girl in Detroit, I said, &amp;#039;That&amp;#039;s where I have to go.&amp;#039; But getting in was hard work: As a high school senior, you needed a 3.6 GPA and a portfolio.&amp;quot; Sui managed to swing the requirements, and freshman year, she met her fashion BFF, photographer Steven Meisel. (Other fashion besties formed at Parsons: the designing duos at Vena Cava and Proenza Schouler.) Meanwhile, Chris Benz almost didn&amp;#039;t make it to his first class because of a big obstacle\u2014his mother. &amp;quot;She showed up to move me into my dorm,&amp;quot; the designer said with a laugh. &amp;quot;And she&amp;#039;s like, &amp;#039;Christopher, this place is a pit. It&amp;#039;s so ugly and so shady\u2014are you sure you don&amp;#039;t want to go home?&amp;#039; She actually started crying. But she cried again after my first fashion show, so I think it worked out.&amp;quot; And then there&amp;#039;s Jason Wu, who joined Sui, Benz, and Donna Karan last night to represent his alma mater and present some serious scholarship money\u2014$250k to be exact, furnished by Hugo Boss, where Wu is the creative director.  After the class of 2014 presented their thesis looks\u2014with standout turns especially from imminent grads Elsa Ling (a master of graphic It Girl outerwear), Wenqi Wu (whose mosaic use of fur recalled Fendi&amp;#039;s latest hits), Sarah Hoopes (a linear tailor of suits with Olsen-brand coolness), and the white-on-white sheer layers displayed by Daron Buckley\u2014the designer received Parsons&amp;#039; ultimate alumni honors: a tiny metal table engraved with his name, and a standing ovation from its current student body. We spoke with the 31-year-old style star about fame, chainsaws, and the best Barbie ever.  Congratulations on your Parsons honor! When you were a kid, did you always want to go here? I wanted to go anywhere that let me learn everything I could about my passion, which was clothing design. And I was extremely fortunate to get into Parsons because they teach you everything, including the idea that there&amp;#039;s a lot you have to figure out on your own. Is it true they give every Parsons freshman a power saw? Yeah, that&amp;#039;s true! They make you buy a tool kit\u2014like a real, hardware store tool kit\u2014as part of your school supplies, and you have to design a 3-D project, and you do get handed a chainsaw. That sounds like a bad idea. Like, someone could lose a finger\u2026 [Laughing] Well, thankfully, not me! But I still use that tool kit.  Do you hem your ball gowns with the chainsaw? No, but, look, when I was starting my own label and I moved into my first studio, I had to do a lot of things myself, and that tool kit really came in handy. And now that we&amp;#039;re more established, I keep it at my place, and I still use it when I have to fix things around the house. You started your career very early designing doll clothes. Does that mean you had a good Barbie stash growing up? I don&amp;#039;t mean to brag, but I think I had the best Barbie stash growing up. I had all the good ones. In your expert opinion, which Barbie has the best style? That&amp;#039;s tough. Which one was your favorite? Malibu Barbie, obviously. She came with a surfboard. Yeah, no\u2026 I didn&amp;#039;t really do Malibu Barbie. I had the Dior Barbie. She was limited edition and so cool. My mom got her for me\u2014how great is that? Your mom is a best-selling author in Taiwan now, and she goes around the country giving speeches on how to raise kids. Does she tell parents to buy Barbies? She tells them to let their kids find their passions and follow them. She is a great mom. I feel like no matter who else is wearing my dresses, she&amp;#039;s always the one I think about when I start a new collection, not her style, necessarily, but just her love and encouragement. I&amp;#039;m fine with my mom talking about what it was like to raise me, even to total strangers, because she really was just the best mom ever. What&amp;#039;s next for your collections? Oh, you know I can&amp;#039;t tell you too much about that! Next is resort, and this is really the first year I&amp;#039;ll be designing two collections per season, one for my line and one for Hugo Boss. It&amp;#039;s definitely made me have to be more conscious about planning and time. But you know, I can&amp;#039;t complain that I&amp;#039;m busy. I think it&amp;#039;s really good for creative people to have many things happening at once. It&amp;#039;s important. What&amp;#039;s the first designer thing you ever bought for yourself? Was it while you were at Parsons? You&amp;#039;re going to think I&amp;#039;m lying. You have to promise that you&amp;#039;ll believe me. I swear on Chanel. What was it? It was a Hugo Boss suit. See? You&amp;#039;ll think I&amp;#039;m just saying that because I&amp;#039;m doing Hugo Boss now, but I swear. I was 14 years old, and I needed my first nice suit, but I still wanted it to look cool and modern, and I wanted it to fit me. So I went to Hugo Boss, I swear, and I was about to be a freshman in high school, and I bought my first suit!  That&amp;#039;s very dapper of you. In high school, most of us were buying Doc Martens. Well\u2026 I mean\u2026 I had Dior Barbie, remember. My high school had a pretty strict dress code, and I think I might have been the only freshman that wanted to follow [it]. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/news/a24807/jason-wu-parsons-interview/>