Media Mavens
Journalism’s new Fashion Media program isn’t just following trends – it’s setting them.
Story by Melanie Jarrett, Fashion photos by Tamytha Cameron
Associate Professor Camille Kraeplin was sitting at her desk in Umphrey Lee, surrounded by
the usual towers of student papers and research, when the email came in. It started out unassumingly
enough – the assistant to a fashion blogger (yes, that’s a thing – more on it later) was
writing to express interest in the Division of Journalism’s new Fashion Media program. Not an
altogether unusual occurrence, although the frequency of email inquiries had begun to increase
lately. She scanned quickly through the email until her eyes came to rest on the name of the
blogger: Garance Doré. Her eyes widened. That’s because Garance Doré isn’t just anyone. The
Parisian-turned-New-Yorker is one of the top (read: influential) fashion bloggers in the world.
Number 11, to be exact – if digital fashion publication Signature9 is to be believed.
“It was a very significant moment for us,” Kraeplin says. As it happened, Doré was going to be
in Dallas for an event at Neiman Marcus headquarters and offered to come speak on campus –
“SHE had heard of US,” emphasizes Kraeplin. Doré’s resulting public forum was a milestone
for the Fashion Media program. Established in fall 2011 as part of Dean José Bowen’s broader
curriculum initiative to create a bevy of new interdisciplinary minors, it has already become
the most popular minor in Meadows. Sixty-seven students are currently registered as minoring
in Fashion Media, with many more taking classes but as yet undeclared.
“It was like Mick Jagger was in the room, the way these
young women responded to her,” Kraeplin, who is the program’s
head, says about the Doré visit. “The room we held it
in seats about a hundred, and it was overflowing.”
The visit from the famous blogger was symptomatic of the
way the new curriculum has taken off at Meadows: fast, faster
and fastest. Faculty, students and alumni alike attribute
the rapid explosion of the program to fertile ground, both on
the SMU campus and in Dallas as a whole. Adjunct professor
Kevin Willoughby, who has been teaching fashion history
and fashion marketing around the Metroplex for the past 12
years, says the curriculum is filling a vacuum at a key time in
the evolution of Dallas as a fashion center on par – or at least
in the conversation – with New York and Los Angeles.
“There is a real lack of fashion education at the undergraduate
level both nationally and, specifically, in the Dallas area,”
says Willoughby, who co-teaches Fashion, Media and Culture
with Professor Jayne Suhler as a required course in the
degree plan. “And yet the interest in fashion and the fashion
industry itself in Dallas is at an all-time high. The 2011
Gaultier exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art was a watershed
moment; you had people going two and three times,
and it just shattered attendance records.”
The program also benefits from the city’s reputation as
a center for fashion retail giants like Neiman Marcus,
JCPenney and Fossil. “There are also local designers, stylists
and fashion journalists making names for themselves here,”
Suhler says. “It is an electric time right now for fashion
in Dallas.”
The minor focuses on three disciplines under the larger
umbrella of Fashion Media, which Kraeplin broadly defines
as “any sort of media that is related to the fashion industry”:
journalism (which includes blogging), public relations
(which includes event planning and social media) and photography
(which includes styling). The 20 hours of required
classes cut across a wide swath of academia, from art to
anthropology to theatre to advertising, with three courses
serving as capstones: Fashion Journalism, Fashion Photography
and Fashion Public Relations. Curriculum is intended
to be rigorous, with the goal of training students to become
strong communicators with an expertise in fashion. That notion
of specialization is a hot topic in the world of journalism
education, where academic programs focused on areas like
sports and business journalism are cropping up around the
country. As colleges and universities are forced to keep pace
with the ever-changing media world, the idea of formally
schooling journalism students in a particular field of interest
has taken root as a way to increase chances of job placement
after graduation.
“You don’t send a reporter out to cover the Dallas Cowboys
who doesn’t know who Jerry Jones is, do you?” asks Suhler.
“We’re doing the same thing with fashion media – training
students to apply the same skills they use in our journalism
and newsroom classes, but in a specialized way.”
In fact, the early success of the Fashion Media program may
be a harbinger of the future direction of the entire Division
of Journalism. With Professor and The Belo Foundation
Endowed Distinguished Chair in Journalism Tony Pederson
at the helm since 2003, the division has undergone an evolution
of sorts, embracing new technology and innovative
curriculum aimed at arming students with a complex skill
set required for the current and future workplace.
“We’re preparing students for jobs that didn’t exist five years
ago and perhaps don’t even exist now,” Pederson says. “You
don’t just prepare journalists to work for a newspaper or a TV
station anymore. It’s transcending that kind of segmentation.”
Pederson says the emphasis on specialization is part and
parcel of the fluctuating media landscape – a way to complement
traditional curriculum with knowledge of the blogosphere
and social media, simultaneously training communicators
with a broad skill set but a focused area of expertise.
“We’re forced to rethink the industry every year and to constantly
look at curriculum,” Pederson says. “We don’t – we
can’t – sit around and contemplate where we’ve been. We sit
around and contemplate what’s going to happen in five years
or even 20 years. Our challenge is to prepare students for
that, and it’s something we enjoy immensely.”
SMU Meadows’ Fashion Media curriculum is paving the
path for what Pederson, his peers and, increasingly, the
fashion industry itself see as a needed area of formal training.
There is no other program like it in the country, although
a few schools are in the process of trying to replicate it.
Degrees in fashion merchandising and fashion design are in
plentiful supply, but Meadows’ unique take on the industry
stands alone, poised to continue the rise to prominence
signaled by Garance Doré’s visit to campus last fall.
“This program is part of the commitment that we as a school
have to respond to the culture of Dallas and the community
and the history that we have here,” says Pederson. “It can
flourish here in a way that it couldn’t almost anywhere else.”
The team of faculty assigned to the task of creating and
enhancing the curriculum also take care to emphasize one
other point critical to the success of the degree plan: the
students who not only take the classes, but begged for the
curriculum to exist in the first place. Kraeplin, Suhler and
Willoughby credit the high level of knowledge and sophistication
many of the students possess before entering their
classrooms as key indicators of the quality of students interested
in the topic.
“It’s not just a level of fashion sophistication, but it’s an
intellectual and scholarly sophistication,” says Suhler.
“We hold them to really, really high standards and they
meet them every time. They are hungry for knowledge.”
Echoes Kraeplin: “These are not just girls who are in the
class because they like clothes and they want to talk about
shoes. These students have a deeper interest in fashion and
they see it as something that reflects our culture and is very
personal to them as a means of self-expression.”
In fact, many of the students have already created and begun
to build audiences for their own personal fashion blogs – a
necessity in an industry where developing an original voice is
prized. As an example, recent alumna Krystal Schlegel’s blog
The Style Book has already exceeded 80,000 unique visitors;
in fact, the number of times the phrase “if you don’t have your
own blog yet, you’re already behind” was uttered during the research
of this piece is more than can be counted on one hand.
In addition, a significant piece of the Fashion Media curriculum
is devoted to the editorial vision and maintenance of
the site smufashionmedia.com, an outlet devised by Kraeplin
to bridge the gap between the casual tone of blogs and the
formality of more traditional media. A popular feature called
“On the Boulevard” highlights the everyday fashion of the SMU student population through photos, but the site also
hosts longer-form news stories and features. Each year
Kraeplin recruits a student editor to help her manage the
blog, which has more than 30 contributors who post weekly.
There is also this spring’s second annual SMU Fashion
Week, a weeklong celebration of the fashion industry complete
with panels featuring working fashion professionals
and designers, as well as a fashion show (see opposite for
more details). One of this year’s executive directors is Rebecca
Marin, a junior triple majoring in communication studies,
public relations and advertising who interned at Vogue. The
way she landed the internship is indicative of the personalities
of the students who seriously pursue a future in the field:
She methodically highlighted every contributor to a Condé
Nast publication whose work she admired. A bit of sleuthing
revealed that all employees on the Condé Nast roster have
the same email address format, so she emailed them – all of
them. Eventually one replied, and a few interviews later she
was on her way to New York for the summer. And yes, she has
a blog (rebeccaamarin.blogspot.com).
“Our best students are so incredibly entrepreneurial,”
Kraeplin says. “I think that’s true across the board in media
today: You have to be entrepreneurial to succeed.
“Blogging has provided tremendous opportunities in the
fashion industry, but it’s not just the act of creating it. It’s
spending time, even money, on it and honing your voice in an
authentic way. Having the opportunity to take this hobby that
is very personal to them and actually make a living from it is
very motivating and exciting to them.”
The buzz surrounding the program has built to an almost
deafening level – just conducting a 30-minute interview with
any of the principal professors is fraught with interruptions,
from students seeking feedback on a project to those begging
for entry to already-full classes. It’s an excitement the Division
of Journalism hopes to capitalize on with a new Fashion
Media major, on track to debut in fall 2013. The degree
would further position the division and SMU Meadows as
the leader in a field exploding in popularity, staking claim
to uncharted academic territory. Kraeplin says the expansion
of the program would allow students to dig deeper into
the fashion and retail industry, adding courses about the
business of fashion and trend forecasting, to name just a few.
It would also add to the already distinguished list of Meadows
alumni who hold prominent roles in the industry and
help current students and recent graduates gain a foothold
toward coveted internships and entry-level positions. A quick
rundown of Meadows alumni who have taken an interest in
the program includes Amber Venz, creator of rewardStyle, a
business that helps bloggers monetize their efforts; Brittany
Edwards Cobb, creator of the Dallas Flea and editor of the local
edition of Daily Candy; Sarah Bray, who runs social media
for Neiman Marcus; and Christina Geyer, managing editor
of The Dallas Morning News’ style publication, FD Luxe.
“We are giving students a truly specialized introduction to the
world of fashion media,” Suhler says. “And we’re sending them
out into the world armed with a rigorous scholarly background
and a strong, practical skill set that will help them excel in
their jobs as journalists, PR practitioners and copywriters.
“We have a special opportunity in front of us to truly lead
the way in this field. We know our alums are going to go on
and do really fabulous things in the fashion industry, because
many of them already are.”