Heather Morrison/Chronicle
The fashion works of student designer Jennifer Harden are displayed as part of Fashion Columbia 2003 on May 8. Further coverage of the event is in the Arts & Entertainment section.

Fashion Columbia 2003, the seventh annual year-end fashion show, was by many accounts the most successful ever. Focusing more on the avant-garde and conceptual, the show featured some 69 designs by 27 designers.

The show opened with Jennifer Harden’s skin-tight latex designs and concluded with Dieter Kirkwood’s black shantung silk avant eveningwear.

“The show was dynamic—the level of creativity, the silhouettes, the color palettes, the texture, the hemlines—I thought it was an incredible show,” said Lisa Newell, part-time marketing faculty.

Held twice on Thursday, May 8 in an undeveloped floor in the Ludington Building, 1104 S. Wabash Ave., the show was the result of two semester’s work by Nena Ivon’s Advanced Fashion Show Production class.

Ivon said Fashion Columbia is the only student-conceived and -produced show of its kind.

—Michael Hirtzer

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Fashion Columbia ‘in the raw’

The eighth floor of the Ludington Building had the errant feeling of an illegal warehouse party May 8. The raw space, with an absence of any walls, carpeting or tile, was an appropriate choice for Fashion Columbia 2003, the year-end event put on by the students of the Advanced Fashion Show Production Class.
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