When not taking West Valley College students to world capitals of art and fashion, the Bill and Leila Cilker School of Art and Design (SoAD) brings those worlds directly to campus. Take as examples these recent and upcoming activities:
- In June, 17 West Valley students and two faculty traveled to Paris for a six-day SoAD Art and Fashion Study Tour, including a stop at the Paris College of Art, a new partner institution easing the way for WVC transfers.
- In October, West Valley participants head to Mexico City for 2024 Global Fashion Graduate, making WVC the first community college worldwide invited to the conference for fashion educators.
- Then, in Spring 2025, SoAD will co-host the fifth annual Responsible Fashion Series, the global fashion industry’s response to challenges including sustainability, digitalization, and consumer shifts.
“We’re creating an international profile for the fashion program,” said Dean Shannon Mirabelli-Lopez of SoAD, a longtime fashion curator and industry insider. “Fashion is an international business, an international industry, and international cultural language. For any fashion program to be worth its weight, you have to have an international presence.”
Each WVC Art and Fashion Study Tour—now in its second year following a 2023 tour to New York City—introduces participants to a world capital of art and fashion.
“It’s the capital of art, fashion, architecture, craftsmanship; that is Paris,” said tour leader and WVC instructor Lorrie McPheeters. “That’s why we knew this would be the place to go.”
Students on the tour said it was an opportunity they never expected, added McPheeters, who also runs the campus Fashion Lab and the Costume Shop for the Theater department. She was joined on the tour by art history faculty Cynthia Napoli-Abella Reiss.
McPheeters and Mirabelli-Lopez credit SoAD benefactor Alyce Parsons and the Parsons Fashion and Styling Innovation Fund WVC for providing significant support to program participants, with a majority receiving scholarships in 2023 and 2024.
Approximately 75 percent of Paris program participants had never traveled outside the U.S. previously and one had never flown on an airplane.
Students toured landmarks including the ship-shaped Louis Vuitton Foundation Museum; fashion history museum Musee de la Mode Galleria; and the Louvre, where they absorbed lectures on fashion history as viewed through art.
In addition to gaining exposure to another culture and resiliency needed to get around a major city abroad, students gleaned in-person experiences and insights that readings and lectures alone cannot impart, McPheeters observed.
“When we went to the Dior Fashion Archive, and you see the original dress that Christian Dior actually made, we all stood around in silence,” she said. “What they’re seeing is what is possible in real life, instead of a piece of paper or a picture. They can stand before it and see how it was made.”
Visits to two fashion schools, the Istituto Marangoni and the Paris College of Art, rounded out the itinerary.
West Valley recently entered an agreement with the latter, an accredited American school teaching courses in English, that will smooth the way for WVC students wishing to transfer. One tour participant has already initiated the process.
The fashion world is small, West Valley faculty say. Establishing strong ties to fashion schools and other industry connections is a boon for students when it comes time to transfer or job hunt.
Mirabelli-Lopez expects that to be the case for two students, Joshua and Kayla, participating with her at the Global Fashion Graduate conference in Mexico.
Conference organizers invited both students to exhibit work previously displayed in the West Valley STEAM’D Fest fashion show. Because Joshua is undocumented, he is unable to travel in-person to the conference. His designs, however, will be featured in an on-site exposition, as will Kayla’s.
Additionally, Kayla will receive opportunities to meet global fashion designers and to see her brightly colored creations—Mirabelli-Lopez deems them Prada-esque and feminine yet not frilly— in a fashion show. By contrast, the dean draws parallels between Joshua’s minimalist works, rendered in dark, sustainable materials, and brutalist architecture.
Association with GFG offers immense value to students and the college, the dean said.
“It’s industry exposure, exposure to graduate and undergraduate programs in fashion,” Mirabelli-Lopez said. “Also, both of them are there representing West Valley, which raises the visibility of their program which in turns will offer all West Valley students opportunities.”
In Spring 2025, the world of fashion academia is invited to the heart of Silicon Valley when Mirabelli-Lopez anticipates co-hosting the Responsible Fashion Series at West Valley in collaboration with California College of the Arts.
The series evolved from a program launched in 2012 by fashion education institutions affiliated with the “big four” fashion weeks based in New York, Paris, London, and Milan. The values-based event—previously held in places as far-flung as the Netherlands, India, and Uzbekistan—asserts that fashion can be a catalyst for change and embraces a free and accessible participation model, subject to registration.
Planning remains in early stages, but programming, including presentation of academic papers, can be expected to explore industry issues and ambitions such as becoming less wasteful, cleaner, more ethical and fairer, and more intelligent.
It’s one more step in elevating West Valley's reputation.
“People have to know you’re there and producing high quality work,” Mirabelli-Lopez said. “Then they’ll come to us; they’ll want our graduates.”