For a second year in a row fourteen of Parsons BFA Fashion Design graduates presented their thesis collections and competed among each other in Parsons’ and Kering’s Empowering Imagination Competition. The finalists were judged by a panel of top fashion insiders that included Eco Age's Livia Firth, Style.com's Dirk Standen, Barneys New York's Dennis Freedman, Kering's Laurent Claquin, "Paper" magazine's Mickey Boardman, and Parsons' Simon Collins. Top honours were awarded to Harim Jung for her womenswear designs and to Yunxiang Zhou for her menswear designs.
Still it was no other than Greek finalist and Parsons graduate Eileen Pappas who caught our eye with her collection “Women in States of Undress”.
"My design ethos places the body first and foremost. My thesis collection, inspired by the nude female drawings of Egon Schiele, centers around composing garments on the body, just as the draftsman composed his drawings on sheets of paper. I started from the typical framework of a drawing—the rectangle—and developed a system of draping that led to garments freed from traditional methods of patternmaking and classical constraints of construction. My concept of Women in States of Undress challenges the way women dress, as well as what defines a garment." Says Pappas regarding her collection.
Eileen Pappas was born in Athens, Greece, and attended the American Community Schools of Athens through high school. She moved to the United States in 2001 to attend Brown University, where she majored in architectural studies, as well as premed studies. After two years of medical school in Budapest, Pappas changed her focus to fashion design and moved back to the United States to attend a summer intensive course in fashion design at Parsons The New School for Design. Falling in love with the subject matter and stimulated by the environment, she applied for the BFA program in fashion design at Parsons. Over the course of her studies, Pappas completed a variety of professional internships at Donna Karan Collection, Stoll FTNY, St. John Knits, and Gigi Burris Millinery, and produced freelance knitwear projects for Billy Reid and Simon Miller. Her greatest honour was winning the 2012 CFDA Geoffrey Beene Design Scholarship Award.
