Welcome to MADE@COLUMBIA 2025!  

You are about to witness our third iteration of the completely overhauled annual fashion experience that fashion programming at Columbia has been orchestrating in the South Loop for three decades! We retooled Columbia’s fashion show to bring together and showcase creative practices from across Columbia and not just in the School of Fashion.  

I like to say that fashion is a visual art and a performing art and a media art and a business, and we wanted our annual show to bring all those parts of fashion to the forefront. We hope what you witness feels every bit to you like the celebration of the Chicago style hotspot known as “Columbia” that we mean it to be, shown off for all our friends and in concert during one mind-blowing, mood-setting, awe-inspiring hour! 

What I’m captivated by this year is the way our designers are, more than ever, focusing their talents on using fashion to tell their stories and process deeply personal emotions as they play out in the context of narratives. People sometimes think of fashion as the cohering of mass cultural trends and themes into wearable visual forms, and of course it is that in part. But right now, I’m really noticing how our young designers are stepping away from composites and aggregates to create texts absolutely resonant with what I know to be their living and embodied experiences, difficult feelings, fervent desires, spiritual quests, and pressing questions about the past and future.  

The image of the superficial “fashionista” is strong within our culture, thanks to the kinds of misogyny, homophobia, and racism that trivialize and degrade art forms predominantly consumed and produced by women and femmes, queer folks, people of color, and unconventionally masculine men. But what we are seeing today is a design cohort less intent on being scenesters than using fashion as a kind of book that you can crawl into, legible as it walks the street. Consider our runway a kind of library, and dig in. 

I see stories about how to turn grief into expressions of joy, stories that metabolize fear and sadness until they morph into exuberance. Sometimes the stories capture curiosity or foreboding about the future; others, they reflect on past Zeitgeists as though they were characters and allow times gone by to roam the runway. We are invited to peer through windows of homes and churches at the settings and happenings there, or to hang out at public landmarks and gardens or in magnified spaces populated by microbial communities as the fly on the wall of their goings-on.  

If you see something that feels like there’s a story behind it today, there is. See if you can read it! Or better yet, ask the designer to tell you about it. This work is an invitation—no, an incitement!—not only to reading but to the long winding conversations that happen among friends when a story is spent, so don’t be afraid to start talking.  

Dr. Colbey Reid, Director, School of Fashion