Fashion students at Kent State University have been awarded two grants totalling nearly $70,000 - and they have cotton to thank for them.
The grants, funded by Cotton Incorporated, will support collaborative studies between merchandising and design students at Kent State’s Fashion School under the leadership of Assistant Professor Gargi Bhaduri, Ph.D., and course studies on social media use in fashion merchandising under Assistant Professor Mourad Krifa, Ph.D.
“It’s between me and (Assistant Professor) Ja Young Hwang,” Dr. Bhaduri said in a statement. “It’ll be a collaborative project between a fashion branding course and the senior fashion design studio.”
Students will assemble in groups made up of four to five merchandising students and two to three design students. Merchandising students will come up with an idea for a brand and conduct market research and feasibility studies, using social media platforms to gain a sense of consumers’ perceptions about products. The design students will then create a capsule collection for the brand, focusing on cotton apparel.
“It’s about information literacy and giving them the tools to analyze and become proficient in extracting essential information from social media because that’s where a lot of our consumers are now,” Dr. Krifa said in a statement.
