The New-York Time: Fashion During Wartime at Shenkar's Graduates Exhibition 2014
Last Tuesday, as most of the fashion flock was filing into the Palais de Chaillot to watch the Armani Privé haute couture show - idly musing, perhaps, on whether or not Caviar Kaspia might have a free table one evening or whether Emma Watson would appear in yet another front row - Leah Perez, the head of the fashion program at Shenkar College of Engineering and Design, the pre-eminent fashion college in Israel, was attending a different kind of show, wondering about very different kinds of questions.
The kinds of questions that would probably never occur to her peers at the Istituto Marangoni or Central Saint Martins or the Fashion Institute of Technology.
“It was about 6:30 p.m., and we were starting the first of two graduate shows,” she said. “There were about 700 people in the audience: parents and tutors and journalists and celebrities... And then all of a sudden everyone started getting text messages on their mobile phones that the sirens were going off, and the rockets were coming to Tel Aviv".
The idea that fashion is worth this kind of risk - that fashion would matter at all in a conflict zone amid questions of life and death and geopolitical diplomacy - may strike most people as anomalous, and possibly even absurd.