The Ministry of Monochrome, Fashion’s Conscience’s yearly fashion show, was a night filled with cutting edge fashion, club bangers, live rap and shmoney dancing.

Lawrence Jackson, the co-host of the show, set the tone of the night early. “If you want nice language make some noise,” he said. “But if you wanna cuss scream ‘f*ck* that.’”

There was a friendly air in the audience—crowd members were chatting to each other, taking selfies, shouting out runway model’s names as they walked, and were often part of the show itself.

An hour before doors opened, JaLisa Vaughn, FC’s technology and PR chair, spoke on why the show was so different this year.

“For the majority of the people in our organization it’s our senior year,” she said. “We wanted to leave a big impression, a lot of our members are either seniors or freshman. We wanted to give them an opening.”

The collections the student models of Fashion’s Conscience strutted down the runway Saturday night featured designers and companies Coco & Breezy, Laurel Roach, Equota, Sean De Ross and others. The designers themselves were part of the show, which was set to the soundtrack of “Trap Queen,” “Hookah,” “Hannah Montana,” and other club bangers.

The penultimate collection showcased in-house student designers. Brittany Bellos, Chanell Chebuske, Jasmin Bogues, Laura Fidati, and others contributed to the student collection.

“It looks more professional than last year,” said audience member Jerih Barry. “I think the show was very good.”

The finale closed with Jackson leading into Ty Dolla $ign’s performance, which ended up being an hour long wait. The crowd was growing restless, but instead of getting frustrated passed the hour long wait with dancing and crowd interaction from FC members. At last, the lights went down and Ty Dolla $ign, with almost no introduction, dove straight into “Stand Up.”

The runway turned into Ty’s personal stage and he ripped through “Lord Knows,” “Wood and Leather,” and “Dead Presidents.”

“I’m just tryna hear ‘Or Nah,’ though,” said a girl in the front row. The audience wasn’t that into it—the people up front were dancing, but the crowd was only about two rows deep, and half of them were just standing around watching.

 

Ty let the background vocals do most of the work for him. Most of the audience had left before he was halfway through his set.

Ty hopped offstage at the end of the night. A small crowd formed around him and he turned it into a photo-op, putting himself in everyone’s Snapchat stories. He let his last song ride out in the background, one he was only a couple of lines into.

“I wanna thank all of ya’ll for giving me the best 2014,” he said, talking about his recent boost in success. But by the time he was saying those last words on stage, only a couple of diehard fans were still hanging around to hear it.

Published on March 29, 2015 at 1:00 pm

Contact Momin: mrafi@syr.edu