Autos, fashion collide through design at GM Design Dome

• Detroit’s College for Creative Studies hosted its fifth annual fashion show at the General Motors Design Dome on April 26.
• Twenty-six CCS students, including seven graduating seniors, presented diverse designs to an audience of global brands including Louis Vuitton, Hermès and Carhartt.
• CCS is a close-knit creative hub. GM and CCS have a strong relationship, GM’s Chief of Design Michael Simcoe, who serves on CCS’s Board of Trustees, said.

This story has been updated with additional information.

General Motors’ Design Dome is accustomed to serving as the stage of a dramatic reveal.

But on April 26, the massive historic dome wasn’t filled with designers, executives, and members of the news media waiting in anticipation of the latest GM vehicle.

A crowd of about 300 fashion enthusiasts, big brand representatives, and members of Detroit’s College for Creative Studies community flocked to Warren to glimpse the work of 26 fashion design program students strut down the runway in the college’s fifth annual fashion show. Many traveled from overseas.

A deeply personal experience

Students presented collections featuring a range of thick and outlandish high heels and bags to golden face coverings and ball gowns that drape the floor. The diverse, personal, and deep themes students presented through their work made the show compelling, said Rey Pador, an associate professor of fashion design and the apparel section lead at CCS. 

Themes included “a notion of feeling shelter within yourself as a Black person in white spaces or trying to find coziness within bigger shapes that give a kind of brutal exterior, but they’re cozy and cushioned from the inside,” Pador said. “Every student displays an inner feeling of wanting and needing.”

The professional lighting and floor space made the GM Design Dome an ideal place for a show, GM’s Chief of Design Michael Simcoe, who serves on CCS’s Board of Trustees, said. 

Moving the show, whose fashion department is in its 10th year under the leadership of Finnish designer Aki Choklat, also offered the opportunity to showcase the deep relationship between the Detroit automaker and the school.

Automotives and fashion may not seem similar to an outside eye, but they merge through the world of design, Simcoe said.

“There’s a recognition that design is now the factor that delivers a customer experience and an emotional connection between a customer and a car,” Simcoe said. “Most things are done similarly in the (auto) business in a technical sense, so it’s the design and brand that make the difference. More now than ever, customers will look at something that’s a little bit different, well-branded, fresh.”

Representatives from ultra luxury brands Louis Vuitton and Hermès as well as Detroit-founded workwear company Carhartt and others attended the fashion show to look for those fresh and functional perspectives.

Zippers on convertibles, zippers on purses

Diane Mahady, North America President of France-based brand Hermès, said the company has had a strong relationship with Detroit and its automakers for generations. Hermès was the first designer to put zippers on bags, and Ford inspired that design, she said.

“We learned that technology here three generations ago,” Mahady said. “Our current CEO’s great-great-grandfather had been here and toured with Ford cars. They had zippers for the convertible roofs, and that’s where we first saw zippers and what he took back to France and applied to the bags.”

Hermès started its relationship with CCS four years ago when it opened a store in the Somerset Mall in Troy, Mahady said.

“We’re always looking for (students with) genuine creativity and adaptability and a certain level of practical application,” Mahady said.

Ben Ewy, Carhartt’s vice president of global product design, said Carhartt values a CCS education and that current students and alumni work with Carhartt. 

“We love student work because they don’t know the word ‘no,’ ” Ewy said. “For them, everything is possible. It’s an inspiration for us to just see their creative ways of looking at brands and products.”

Small class sizes and one-on-one tutelage from professors is part of what sets CCS apart from larger fashion schools in London and New York City, student designers said. The show included all seven of the fashion design program’s graduating seniors and an array of works by underclassmen who impressed CCS faculty and a board of local designers by showing half of their collections.

“I’m very close with all my professors, and everyone in the department is so helpful to one another,” junior design student Veronica Wardowski said. “It’s a very tight-knit community.”

Wardowski has been playing the violin for 15 years and said she wanted to capture her love for the instrument in her design, especially since she has less time to play while in fashion school.

“I wanted to encapsulate the drama behind performing, performance wear, everything that goes on in a performance, when a bow hair breaks, the elegance of concert halls, and the drama of that,” Wardowski said. “I wanted to use wood because the instruments are the beauty in my eyes.” 

Junior fashion design student Isabella Abohasira, of West Bloomfield, said “Inglorious Bastards,” one of her favorite movies, inspired her design.  

“I started incorporating humor into really scary stuff,” Abohasira said. “I wanted to make fun of everything because, obviously, it’s easier for people to digest stuff that’s funny than serious.” 

It’s about landing a job

While hosting a fashion show may be a lot of fun, the primary opportunity is to help students find employment after graduation, said Choklat, chair of the CCS Fashion Design Department. The fashion show is just one opportunity to bring students and industry leaders together.

“They come to us because our students’ work is interesting. It’s new and it’s fresh,” Choklat said, adding that CCS will offer a fashion business major in its curriculum in fall 2026.

CCS is not just a local school but a global one. Choklat moved to Detroit from Florence, Italy, about 10 years ago.

“I saw the city as a laboratory,” Choklat said. “I thought that we can make everything possible here. We can grow something, really, together. It’s so saturated in Europe and in the big (U.S.) cities. Here, it was just a big playground for me.”

Ewy said Detroit has a great history of combining art and science through functional design.

“Things need to be functional, but they also need to move you emotionally,” Ewy said. “And I think that you see that throughout, whether it’s with furniture from the west side of the city, whether it’s through the automotive design worldwide, which Detroit leads, or work wear, we think that there’s a great history of functional products that comes out of the Detroit area.”

The fashion show celebrated CCS’s 10th year of having a fashion department.

“We celebrate the hard work that everyone put into their collections, but also want to acknowledge the hard work that the people of Detroit put into this iconic city,” the Darth Vader-like filtered voice announcer said at the start of the show.

“The influence the city has is palpable in every drawing and every fiber of every collection. … We are honored to be a part of this city’s history.”