SWAG (2023 - 2024)
After a sketchy presentation and a harrowing interrogation, we ended up being accepted to the EPFL Art association Artepoly as members of the comity and head of the new fashion department. Despite being accepted, it felt like no one had the same enthusiasm and optimism as we did.
In September 2023, as the school year started again, the first SWAG workshops took place. The amount of attendees was so high we didn’t have enough chairs for everyone, the room was packed.
In this first workshop, Kerem and I explained how we envisioned the weekly meetups to function, and the long term ambitions of SWAG.
The idea behind SWAG was to create a weekly workshop where people could come and learn, create and teach fashion design in a collaborative manner. We wanted to eliminate any form of hierarchy between us and the participants, taking only the role of facilitator by providing the required equipment and a common workspace. No restrictive frameworks or themes were given to the participants so as to give them total freedom on their creations. The Goal was to organise a runway show at the end of the year to show everyone what we had all worked on throughout the year.
With time, less and less people would come every week, leaving only a small group of students coming consistently every week. Time flew by very fast and before we knew it, the runway show was a few months away.
On my behalf, I was working on a 7 outfit collection with my girlfriend Tabatha and we weren’t close to having finished, having finished maybe 1 out of the 7 outfits. At that point we decided to go all in, our days would consist mostly of sewing and, a few nights a week, we would stay up until 4 or even 5am working or our collection. Juggling school and extracuricular activities at that point had become impossible, except for a few classes I would sacrifice my sleep for.
Having never sewn before, I was rapidly learning and getting faster, but time was still very limited.
We ended up finishing the day of the runway show, Tabatha put the finishing touches onto our final jacket as I was preparing the Event along with my friends at Lümm.
In the end, the runway show was a huge success. Around 200 people came to watch our creations and we could not be happier with ourselves.