At the end of summer going into her sophomore year, senior Hannah Glaze enters a room in a hotel in Irving for the Texas Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising (FIDM) convention. After the Out-of-State Admissions Coordinator finishes introducing herself, the lights dim and a video begins demonstrating different types of classes the institute offers. After walking around the convention, and seeing different people with their own style, Glaze realizes FIDM was the place she was meant to go.
“I’ve always had a thing for fashion. You know when you were little and you change your mind every 10 seconds over what you want to be, well I will remembers always, I wanted to be a model,” Glaze said. “My freshman year I realized I could do a lot with outfits. I really liked putting stuff together. I always knew I liked shopping but that was just a hobby.”
It wasn’t until Glaze’s summer going into sophomore year, when she went on her usual vacations with her family to California, she found out about FIDM.
“We were driving behind this car that had a FIDM sticker on the bumper and my mom was like, ‘Hey, the fashion institute of Design and Merchandising, looks pretty cool.’,” Glaze said. “So when we got home from our vacation, my mom looked it up and everything and found out that they were going to have a Texas convention.”
At the convention, when Glaze found out that Fashion Styling was what she wanted to do for a career, she was entered in a drawing for a free three day session of The Three Days of Fashion, a clinic held in the building of FIDM where people from all over the world come to learn about the different majors offered at FIDM.
“They were hands-on activities, so if you would learn about the shoe, they would have you draw out a shoe and you learned about the history of it,” Glaze said. “And then you would go to a class and you would have to turn an old garment from a thrift store into something modern and different fabrics and you can cut or change it. You take something from someone else and mix and match. There was a lot of classes.”
Before going to the clinic, Glaze was given an adviser, Laura Gorham. When she went to FIDM for the Three Days of Fashion, they decided Glaze would be a Marketing and Visual Communications major.
“I work at Delias, I’ve worked there for over a year, and I really like the whole atmosphere, so I’m really good with marketing,” Glaze said.
When discussing with her adviser, Glaze shared how she would really like the idea of being a stylist for a magazine.
“I love being the creative person, you know, when you look at Vogue Magazine, you see the layout and you see the outfits that someone put together for the oncoming season,” Glaze said. “Someone had to put that outfit together, that’s a Fashion Stylist and that’s what I want to be. That’s so awesome to me and I would love to do something like that.”
By her senior year, Glaze applied to FIDM and worked on projects for admission into the Visual Communications department. One of the projects she had to create was a window display for the oncoming trends. Another was an interior display, which is basically where it has to appeal with what is portrayed or portrayed to on a table or t-stand.
“The hardest one was when I had a circle, a square and a triangle and I could do whatever I wanted with it,” Glaze said. “Since I’m really good with collages and a girly-girl, I took the objects I got card stock and I made collages with different colors on the cardstock and I cut out the circles, sqaures and triangle. I put them together to make a flower. I went out and took pictures with it.”
When Glaze finally submitted her application to her adviser and had a phone interview with admissions, they both were impressed.
“My advisor told me, after I got the phone call saying I was accepted, the Admissions lady told her ‘she was going to do real good here’. Apparently everybody knows me up there I don’t even know,” Glaze said. “All these other advisers know me and I don’t even know them.”
