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UPDATED: Aug. 18, 2020 at 6:30 p.m.

After being away from her friends at Syracuse University for months, Aanya Singh felt she lacked a sense of community.

Singh, president of Fashion and Design Society at SU, returned home to India in February when her semester abroad was cut short due to the coronavirus pandemic. Feeling disconnected, she reached out to Raff Guglielmino, head of communications at FADS.

Guglielmino noticed that many internships were being held remotely, and she wanted to create a virtual space where all SU students could prepare for their post-grad world while staying home.

Over the course of two months, Guglielmino and Singh planned F*4, FADS Fashioning Future Fellows, a talk series held via Zoom with professionals in the fashion industry. The series is open to all SU students, providing them with an opportunity to learn from current professionals in the fashion industry.

Ashley De Rosa of Nike Global Brand Imaging spoke Aug. 7 as part of the fourth segment of the series, and F*4 will resume in September once the 2020-21 academic year begins.

“It’s about connecting people during a time of disconnect,” Guglielmino said.

Despite having a 10-hour time difference between them, Guglielmino and Singh spoke over Zoom every day to plan the series.

When choosing the speakers, Guglielmino, Singh and members of the FADS e-board browsed through the SU alumni network on LinkedIn and reached out to those in their own networks.

One of the speakers in the series was Erin Reimel, a beauty and wellness editor at Shape Magazine who graduated from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in 2016 with a degree in magazine journalism.

Reimel said she wanted to give back to her alma mater and is always open to giving feedback to students. She benefited greatly from the guidance of alumni when she was a student herself, she said.

The talk series is divided into subsections and touches on both the present and the future of the fashion industry. In her talk, Reimel referenced “The Devil Wears Prada,” a film about an aspiring journalist who works as an assistant to a ruthless editor at a fashion magazine.

“I think there’s a shift; there’s this ideal of ‘The Devil Wears Prada,’ and you have these big, scary editors who think they’re above everyone,” Reimel said. “That’s definitely not the case anymore, and they’re mostly younger millennials and older millennials who I think saw the power of networking.”

Holding F*4 on Zoom proved to have many benefits, as other guest speakers most likely would not have come up to Syracuse to speak in person, Singh said. One speaker, Salehe Bembury, is currently based in Los Angeles. A graduate of the Class of 2009, Bembury serves as vice president of sneakers and men’s footwear at Versace.

Guglielmino and Singh didn’t want the series to focus solely on fashion design. The two made sure that they had speakers from all aspects of “the big umbrella of fashion,” Guglielmino said. The series expanded to topics such as international student life, Singh added.

“I think that F*4 is for everybody, not just for people who want to work in the fashion industry,” Singh said.

The series was “the silver lining of the pandemic,” Sandrine Bamba, head of set design for FADS, said, and was a way for her to advance her creative ability and learn from others despite being in a very static time in her life.

“It’s a nice little beacon that things can still be good, just not in a way we expect them to be,” she said.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this post stated that Salehe Bembury was a graduate of the Class of 2004. Bembury graduated in 2009. The Daily Orange regrets this error.

Published on August 17, 2020 at 7:52 pm

Contact Jade: jchung19@syr.edu