Pratt’s Miracle on 34th Street

Fashions in paper created by Pratt students Thom Forsyth, James Ian Killinger, and Chia Lin Hsu (photos by Antoine Bootz)

By Carolyn Mooney

The Christmas displays are gone, but tourists are still gawking at the windows of Macy’s flagship store in Manhattan.

The windows are now featuring the white-on-white designs of Pratt Institute students, who created sculptural works and clothing out of white paper to “dress” a high-fashion line of mannequins. One mannequin sports an Elizabethan-like ruff that spirals around the entire body. Another wears a laser-cut swag. Yet others are adorned in confections that look like frothy, feathery, tufted, or origami-like dresses.

“I hesitate to call them dresses,” says Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman, acting chair of fashion design at Pratt (and a menswear designer), who oversaw the project. “They’re more like … sculptures for the body.”

Some two dozen Pratt students from the fields of fashion, interior design, industrial design, and the fine arts created the pieces as part of a semester-long seminar. The project was a collaboration with Ralph Pucci, head of a well-known mannequin company based in New York, who, after meeting Pratt’s president, Thomas F. Schutte, had suggested that the students dress Pucci mannequins.

From there it sounded like an episode from Project Runway: Create a design for the mannequins using only white paper. Emphasize the design. No sewing necessary, since not all the students knew how to sew.

Pratt designs featured in a Macy's window (photo by KC Weakley)

“But we all know how to work with paper,” says Pailes-Friedman, who was inspired by the creativity of students from multiple disciplines. In the end, you couldn’t tell which students from which majors created which pieces, she says.

Dana Otto, a senior industrial-design major from State College, Pa., had been working with laser ornamentation in product design. She decided to apply the technique to construct a dress “that had a lot of volume and really utilized the structural integrity of paper.”

The seminar ended with awards given to the top works (Otto won first prize), and an exhibition of the student work, called “Pratt + Paper & Ralph Pucci,” held at the Pucci showroom in December. A blog at Women’s Wear Daily, a bible of the fashion world, called the exhibition “a clean, modern, and surreal display, devoid of color.” Another visitor was Paul Olszewski, director of windows for Macy’s Herald Square. He knew right away that he wanted to feature the students’ designs in his windows.

(photo by Eddie Belaval)

“I was blown away,” he says. “I thought, I have to put it in the windows. It’s so what we’re about—we love showcasing artists and getting that wonderful fusion of art and fashion.” Some 3,500 people an hour see the windows, he says. “It’s one of those instances where people literally stop to look at everything.”

The six Pratt windows, which face Broadway, will remain up through January 26. Mannequins wearing traditional garments float among those wearing the white paper creations, producing a pop of color from an otherwise cool, white background. Hanging sculptures, also designed by Pratt students, add to the three-dimensionality, like exotic plants in an aquarium.

A catalog from the Pucci exhibition is in the works, and some of the student work will also travel to a trade show in Germany. But it’s hard to beat seeing your work in the windows of the world’s largest department store, as Macy’s bills its Herald Square emporium. KC Weakley, an interior-design graduate student from Illinois, created a chain-mail dress for the project and a separate wall mural for the Macy’s windows. He was at the store when the windows were unveiled to the public. “To see people outside looking at our creations—that was just thrilling.”