It was 6 p.m. on Saturday night and a long line of college students stood along the outside walls of the Revere Hotel, waiting excitedly to join in on the fashion gala proceeding within. Inside, music boomed as the staff prepared themselves for the big night. Attendees milled around various booths, snapped pictures at a photo booth and sampled custards provided courtesy of Shake Shack.
College Fashion Week is an annual event created by Her Campus Media, an agency that markets clients toward young college women. Her Campus Media was founded in 2009 by three Harvard University undergraduates — Stephanie Kaplan Lewis, Windsor Hanger Western and Annie Wang — and publishes the popular online magazine Her Campus.
Started in 2012, College Fashion Week is one of Her Campus Media’s biggest events of the year. The show on Saturday night was multifarious, featuring not only a catwalk but also performances from acts such as The Dear Abbeys of Boston University. As the models walked out onto the stage, showcasing the season’s most stylish trends, Her Campus’ message for the event was clear: be confident and be who you are.
Western, who served as one of the night’s emcees, made it clear to the audience that the event was not just a display of pretty clothes.
“We’re all about body positivity here at College Fashion Week, so please be sure to give [our models] a lot of love [and] a lot of support,” Western said just before the models came out for their last procession. “Because no matter what size you wear, we think you are runway ready.”
Western also stressed the importance of having college models walk the runway.
“None of the models are professional models,” she said. “They’re all current college students and they’re all shapes and all sizes … We tell our models to smile as they’re walking down the runway. It’s all about rocking your confidence, rocking your style and just being comfortable in your own skin.”
Many college students who attended and participated in the show appreciated Western’s sentiments. Stephanie Ramirez, a sophomore in BU’s Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, voiced her appreciation of the variety of looks, styles and body shapes celebrated during the catwalk.
“It’s really nice to have someone who isn’t six feet tall and 100 pounds to be up there and walking,” she said.
Alex Morris, a model in the show and junior at Northeastern University, echoed Ramirez’s words.
“It’s great to show your confidence,” she said. “To be in College Fashion Week, you just have to be confident.”
Another characteristic that separated College Fashion Week from other fashion shows, Western said, was its emphasis on affordability.
“New York Fashion Week, Paris Fashion Week and London Fashion Week … [are] such amazing experiences that so many girls want to partake in, but [they] are just not accessible,” Western said. “So we wanted to create a fashion week specifically for college girls, where they’d have the opportunity to model, they’d have the opportunity to come and cover as a reporter, they’d be able to come and just have this experience.”
The styles exhibited on the catwalk, while creative and trendy, also focused on being relevant to college students’ everyday lives.
“Everything from what you wear to class is fashion,” Western said. “What you wear to the gym is fashion. What you wear when you’re out on a date is fashion … We want to make sure that it is accessible for the day-to-day life of a college student.”
Christina Decker, assistant editor at People Stylewatch and another emcee of the show, said that the entire goal of the fashion show was to encourage girls to feel amazing and empowered by what they wear, while still being excited to be themselves.
“There’s a way to wear a trend no matter your shape, no matter your size, and we just want girls to take that away from the show,” she said. “Fashion should be fun.”
