Jonathan Kyle Farmer, professor and chair, Fashion Design MFA program, will be the guest lecturer at “Polimoda All-Stars, A Celebration of Our American Legacy.”
The special event, held in Florence at the Villa Favard on December 14, is “Polimoda’s statement of cultural solidarity and long-established kinship towards Florence’s ever-growing international community of professional, expats, students and creatives.” It offers the unique opportunity to spend an evening at the villa that serves as Polimoda’s headquarters—a 19th-century palazzo overlooking the Arno River.
Farmer, who developed FIT’s new graduate program in Fashion Design, will give a lecture titled “Shrinking: Fashion.” “As a parallel and play on words, the scale in which we produce fashion is part of the all-consuming, massive, overwhelming [and] grotesque [way] that many feel towards the idea of fashion now,” says Farmer. “Maybe by shrinking it, making it smaller and special again…we can save it from itself and prevent it [from] going completely insane.”
FIT in Florence is one of the college’s three non-U.S. campuses. The other two are in Milan and South Korea. The International Fashion Business Management program—the only one of its kind—allows students to take one year of their bachelor’s program at FIT and one year at the Polimoda International Institute of Fashion Design and Marketing in Florence.