Magazine seeks SU gear designs
For Molly Gallagher, editor in chief of Zipped magazine, this year’s March Madness means more than just basketball. It means new apparel for the Syracuse University community.
Zipped, a campus fashion publication, is making this opportunity possible. Since last fall, Zipped has been working to get its first Gear Design Competition up and running. The winning student design will be produced and sold in the bookstore. The winner will also have photos of their work featured in Zipped.
‘We plan on featuring them in the magazine, so they’ll have some sort of profile and photograph of the designs,’ Gallagher said.
The competition calls for one T-shirt, one sweatshirt, one pair of sweatpants and one apparel design of choice to be sent to zippedpr@gmail.com. The new deadline for submissions is Friday, Feb. 11, extended from the original Feb. 7 deadline.
About 15 submissions have been entered, Gallagher said, but there is always room for more, and entries are not limited to art majors.
‘We want to stress the fact that this is not just for fashion design majors,’ she said. ‘If you’re a biology major and you’ve always had an interest in art and you like fashion, you should definitely submit something.’
The judges of the competition are SU Chancellor Nancy Cantor, men’s basketball guard Scoop Jardine and a few members of the Zipped staff. Gallagher stressed the magazine staff wanted a basketball player’s opinion on the designs because they will be sold during March Madness.
Gallagher said one of the major criteria for judgment is originality because although the bookstore has come a long way with its clothing selections, it has never been home to student-inspired apparel.
‘During my freshman year, the only shirt I used to wear was ‘Real Women Wear Orange,” Gallagher said. ‘Now they have all these different brands, like these sort of vintage-inspired T-shirts and the PINK label, but we also thought, ‘Why not see what other students have in mind?”
Hailey Shellhammer, a freshman fashion design major, is interested in the competition.
‘I think it’s a great idea,’ she said. ‘It gives students a chance in a competitive field a shot at getting their feet wet.’
She also mentioned what she would do if she entered the contest.
‘I would probably want to incorporate more of the positive energy a lot of Syracuse students have at this school and the sports teams’ school pride,’ Shellhammer said. ‘It’s always a sea of orange, you know.’
Shellhammer found out about the competition through Zipped’s social media efforts. Gallagher said the Web initiatives have been valuable for the magazine.
‘There’s just so many opportunities nowadays with the Internet and blogs and Twitter and Facebook to do so many different things, and it’s an interesting project with the magazine,’ Gallagher said.
Krista Johnson, assistant director of public relations for Zipped and sophomore public relations major, said she thinks the project will make a statement.
She said: ‘It’s the fact that ‘Hey, I made this T-shirt, and everybody’s wearing it.”
Published on February 8, 2011 at 12:00 pm
