Students design outfit for a ‘what if’ assignment

Taryn Robinson, Sports Editor

Manhattan High School’s Family and Consumer Sciences Fashion Apparel class put a creative spin on homework. Instead of a regular tedious assignment, the Fashion Apparel students drew their response to the assignment prompt, “If MHS had uniforms, what should they look like?”

In this class, every student made a design, but only two were hand-picked by the teacher and deemed as the designs that would be the ‘what ifs’. The two selections were drawn by sophomore Alexander Cook and senior Jesse Jackson.

“This project for the class we were told would have winners, but I didn’t expect the two winners to be in the newspaper,” Cook said. “I try my best on all my projects, but I guess [my teacher] liked it a lot, [and] I like mine, too.

The requirements were simple and self-explanatory; the students were to create a design that would be the uniform for MHS — a design that the students could make their own.

“My inspiration came [from] my own outfits, something I would wear,” Cook said. “[It’s just] a cardigan and some pants… it’s very versatile and gender-neutral — that’s really what I was going for.”

Each student had very different design ideas, therefore each design turned out different than the other.

“I decided that my color scheme would be like the Manhattan High colors,” Cook said. “You could do optional stuff like adding accessories, [and] I decided to do that by adding a design in gray and I also added a blazer and sweater vest in different colors.”

This isn’t the first project or assignment like this, the students had experience in doing something similar, but thought this project was different, but fun.

“We’ve done croquis projects like this in the past that were one of the bigger kinds of designs,” Cook said. “The first one was just a starting [point] so you don’t really have to make it perfect or anything like that.”

With all the fun that this project and other projects bring, there can be little amounts of stress when drawing designs.

“Once you get into the class, you have to try to minimize errors and things like that because you can definitely notice erase marks, so you just have to try your best,” Cook says.