After a weekend of hectic formatting, editing, and making final touches, the student production team of d'Arte magazine clusters around a computer one last time. Their premier issue, a beautifully photographed mix of high-fashion editorials, student-designer profiles, and Carnegie Mellon news, is set to debut online at 6 p.m. But with the deadline now just minutes away, the group encounters yet another hurdle: the spring 2010 publication has loaded upside-down. It is a tense moment. The creators have hyped this debut for friends and family; they have expectations to meet-including their own.
This was just one more challenge to overcome for the first-time collaborators Editor-in-Chief Efi Turkson (HS'12), Creative Director Hanah Ho (A'12), Art and Photography Director Victor Ng (A'12), Copy Editor Anh Bui (HS'12), and Associate Director Brier Avil (A'12). The students came together in the fall of their sophomore year. It was a gradual process of friends grabbing friends, each bringing a necessary talent to the team. The students began conceiving d'Arte, not for class credits, but simply for their love of fashion. They knew, given the success of campus fashion events like Lunar Gala, like-minded students were out there looking for a voice.
d'Arte has provided a college perspective that Vogue or Harper's Bazaar can't match. By including student interviews and featuring clothing from local boutiques and the university bookstore, d'Arte has developed a fashionista-next-door approach that has won the approval of readers. Most rewarding among the many emails of congratulations, Turkson says, are offers to help. Students are eager to get on board, proving that the magazine has managed to tap into a fashion-savvy segment of the campus community without alienating the average sweatpants-loving undergrad.
"Fashion does have a sense of humor," Turkson explains. "It's more than just, 'I'm gonna wear high heels to class and be snobby 'cause I'm better than you.' That's not what [fashion's] about. ... It's just a different way to express yourself; it's a different way to communicate to people: this is who I am."
That sentiment is the fuel behind the creators' focus. Working continuously on the biannual issues and the magazine's online blog, they keep tabs on campus and city events in addition to recruiting student designers, writers, and models. For Turkson and her collaborators, never-ending refinements are an expected part of the process-even at the launch of that debut issue. As the beaming production team browsed the pages of the newly published-upright-magazine, someone noticed a typo that slipped through proofreading. But just for that moment, they took a breath and decided to let it go. They would fix it later.
-Olivia O'Connor (A'13)
