The Past Recaptured
By Alex Joseph
The good, the bad, and the weird in FIT’s yearbooks
A moment of silence, please, for that deceased institution known as Ye Olde College Yearbook. Social media, among other forces, has pretty much ended that once-perennial annual. FIT’s yearbook, Portfolio, met its end in 2014. Though we occasionally detect a hankering for some unifying record (hence the various FIT alumni Facebook pages, and Instagram accounts like @fashiontech_in_ da_90s), no one seems to miss it much. In every college’s history, there’s an official narrative, and then there’s what really went down. The yearbook straddled these categories:
Sanctioned like a formal portrait, it could also be as casual as a snapshot. The Hue team scoured the 70-year run of Portfolio and assembled a collection of moments that we found … revealing. We wanted images that marked an instant in time (the Classical Listeners Club, 1966); captured an iconic style (the Soul Club, 1992); or just made us go, “WTF?” (the mysterious Last Supper image, which ran without a caption in 1974). We included what we knew, which was usually not much, and often nothing. Know more? Drop us a line at hue@fitnyc.edu!

The 1980 yearbook referred to Textile Technology (now Textile Development and Marketing) as “a growing department” that had existed since the founding of the college. The feature celebrated the then seven-year-old knitting lab. (The lab, updated, is still in use.) The photo shows a Textile Science class taught by Allen Cohen.

In 1989, a jaw-dropping feature, “Bodily Treasures,” showed the shirtless male undergrads who appeared in a calendar, FIT Guys ’89-90, which sold as a fundraiser for students in the American Advertising Federation. The editors wrote, “Who ever said that women are the only ones exploited!” File under: That Wouldn’t Happen Now.
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