WHAT IS VIRTUAL EARTH JAM?
Starting in 2004, the Nurtur Aveda Institutes put on an annual fashion benefit as a vehicle for our students to show off their talents and passion in a themed event that raised money for local charities. In 2021, Earth Jam evolved into a virtual event to continue to offer a unique opportunity for our students.
Earth Jam 2022 gives students the opportunity to express their creativity and compete for a $2,000 scholarship for each member of the winning team.
THE THEME
For 2022 Earth Jam, we will be celebrating the Art & Fashion, inspired by 10 iconic fashion designers.
THE DESIGNERS
CHRISTIAN SiRIANO
Christian Siriano is an American fashion designer. Siriano first gained attention after winning the fourth season of Project Runway, becoming the series' youngest winner. He launched his namesake "Christian Siriano" collection in 2008 and was included in Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2018.
He described himself as a "musical theater kid who loved costumes". Siriano's interest in costume design inspired him to pursue a career in fashion. He began designing clothes at age thirteen while working as a hair washer and styling assistant at Bubbles Salon in Annapolis, and eventually began sewing clothes for the salon's annual hair shows.
Christian Siriano epitomizes everything fashion should be – flamboyant, outrageous, decadent, and fun. Siriano has also become a leader in changing the fashion landscape to include people of all different ages and sizes. He focuses on inclusivity, not exclusivity.
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Betsy Johnson
Betsey Johnson is an American fashion designer best known for her feminine and whimsical designs. Many of her designs are considered "over the top" and embellished. The good-girl perkiness mixed with misbehavior, the extreme industriousness, the penchant for sexy silhouettes lightened with frilly embellishment. Johnson’s signature aesthetic, which she calls “pretty and punk,” tends to take an almost comically high-femme idea (a poofy tulle skirt, a slinky slip, a baby-doll dress) and rough it up it with leopard print, or studs, or skulls—prissy sweetness cut with a touch of poison. At the height of her career, her brand was a must-have for young women taking their first steps into designer party gear; a Betsey dress was a rite of passage, a wearable bridge to adolescence.
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ECKHAUS LATTA
Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta are the founders of Eckhaus Latta, a New York and Los Angeles-based label that distinguishes itself from its peers with its gender-neutral designs and has built a reputation for casting models of all genders, ages, shapes, and sizes in their runway shows and campaigns. The brand is known for their use of unexpected materials, exploring texture and tactility in their designs, and for incorporating writing, performance, and video into their practice. The label was founded in 2001 and has become NYFW mainstays.
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RALPH LAUREN
Mirroring in real life the aspirational image his brand so vividly promotes, Ralph Lauren’s story is the story of the American Dream. A tale of ambition and self-invention, its hero has often been compared to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby—a character, not coincidentally, that Lauren clothed for the 1974 movie The Great Gatsby.
His design signatures are more instantly and automatically recognizable than those of almost any other designer working today: classic, tailored, dashing, tweed-to-lamé looks that remind us of English aristocrats or New England blue bloods weekending in the country. Influenced by the style Lauren himself aspired to, his motifs are one part Western cowboy, one part lord and lady of the manor, and one part Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey. When asked about his earliest inspirations, Lauren consistently cites films he saw as a kid and stars like Gary Cooper and Cary Grant.
After dropping out of college, he made his start in the menswear business. From the beginning, his collections have been based on good, wearable, high-quality basics that everyone needs to keep stocked in their closet: smartly cut blazers, cashmere crewnecks, leather jackets, and oxford shirts.
His reach into womenswear began when he started making clothes for his wife, Ricky, for whom he wanted to adopt a men’s jacket and shirt. That led to a collection of shirts for women . . . and, after a few decades, a multibillion-dollar brand that is synonymous, for millions of customers who want to buy in, with the tailored taste of old-money Americans.
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SCHIAPARELLI
Elsa Schiaparelli created the House of Schiaparelli in Paris in 1927, which she managed from the 30's to the 50's. Starting with knitwear, Schiaparelli's designs celebrated Surrealism and eccentric fashions. Her collections were famous for unconventional and artistic themes like the human body, insects, or trompe-l'œil, and for the use of bright colors like her "shocking pink".
Married and divorced by the early 1920s, she moved to Paris with her daughter where she lived a bohemian lifestyle and acquired a circle of artist friends. In 1927, Schiaparelli launched a fashion business out of her apartment, quickly expanding it and becoming more prolific and inventive. Ten years later, drawing on her relationship with Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, Schiaparelli created one of the most famous gowns in fashion history: the lobster dress.
But Schiaparelli's progressive designs didn't keep her out of the mainstream. In 1934, she became the first female fashion designer to feature on the cover of Time magazine. After decades of success, Schiaparelli shuttered her business in 1954; it lay dormant until being revived in 2012.
Daniel Roseberry, from Plano, Texas was appointed Creative Director of Schiaparelli in 2019. Tasked with reviving the near-century-old couture house, his debut collection was hailed by critics as an exciting and fearless ode to the house’s codes of innovation and irreverence.
Roseberry had the looming legacy of the house's founder, Elsa Schiaparelli, to grapple with. A true renegade, she was perhaps the most important and influential designer between the two world wars, a title challenged only by Coco Chanel, her arch-rival.
“It is my great honor and my joy to pick up where Mme. Schiaparelli left off some 85 years ago. Schiaparelli was a master of the modern; her work reflected the chaos and hope of the turbulent era in which she lived. Today, we find ourselves asking similarly big, identity-shaping questions of our own: What does art look like? What is identity? How do we dress for the end of the world?
Schiaparelli answered these questions with candor and humor, but one of her greatest legacies may be her commitment to fantasy, her understanding that we need fantasy in complicated times. I want to offer my own answers to these questions, and offer a fantasy—a dream—that feels relevant, and necessary, for today.” said Daniel Roseberry.
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GUCCI
It’s quite certain that when Guccio Gucci started out, he never dreamed that his small luggage company would grow to one carrying such cultural significance. But since Gucci was founded in Florence in 1921, the company has built a catalog of genuinely iconic trademarks. The interlocking GG logo; the bar-and-bit belt buckle; the bamboo-handle handbag; the omnipresent loafer—all of them have helped the brand penetrate mainstream culture like no other Italian label in history.
The groundwork for the company’s epic expansion was laid under the leadership of Guccio’s eldest son, Aldo. A flamboyant businessman, he transformed the business into the accessories destination of choice for Europe’s emerging jet set. By the end of the 1960s, everyone from Queen Elizabeth II to Elizabeth Taylor was a patron.
In keeping with the father-son tradition, Aldo’s son Paolo ushered in Gucci’s next great era, in the late 1960s, with the introduction of clothing. By the early ’70s, the lean silhouettes, fur-lined coats, and shiny satin lapels we think of today as Gucci hallmarks began to appear.
In January 2015, Alessandro Michele was appointed the new creative director of Gucci and launched the Renaissance of Gucci, one with a "sophisticated, intellectual and androgynous feel". He revived Gucci classics like the double-G logo, the Jackie O. bag, and created iconic products such as the Dionysus handbag. With feminized menswear, a strong feminist stance, and a 'geek-chic' style, Alessandro Michele introduced postgender props for Gucci.
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Christopher John Rogers
Christopher John Rogers was born and raised in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Encouraged to pursue the arts from a young age, he obsessed equally over anime and the works of Gauguin. His foray into design began by creating costumes for comic book characters, using random fabric or garbage bags, draping them onto a form, and doing whatever he could do to make his vision come to life. It was this innate sense of experimentation that shaped his design process. He also spent many Sundays in the pews of a Baptist church in awe of the attention to detail that went into monochromatically coordinated silk wool ensembles, complete with feathered hats, stockings, and gloves, which inspired his decision to become a fashion designer.
"I found fashion design to be one of the most complete ways for me to express myself visually while relating to the sociability and personality of other people," he says of his decision at such a young age to embark on a career in fashion. "Experimenting with proportions of color on the human form, encouraging people to take up space, and realizing that these shapes we are creating are kinetic forms that are always interacting with the body continues to keep me interested in this medium."
The industry newcomer is making waves and has been named one to watch by many. Robin Givhan put it perfectly: "His work is boisterous, deafening and dramatic. Sometimes it’s extraordinarily, proudly gaudy. He is the fashion industry’s latest obsession." The recent graduate from the Savannah College of Art and Design has a lot of accomplishments under his belt. In 2019, he won the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award, he has been named on Forbes 30 under 30 list. He has also dressed some impressive figures, including Michelle Obama, Lizzo, Rihanna, and Cardi B.
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ADIDAS
The iconic three-stripe sneaker has been stomping its place firmly on the street-style pavement since the ’90s. As an OG sports label, Adidas is also one of the top street style brands right now. “Hailed as ‘the badge of sports’, Adidas is pushing forward brand ultra-modern styles.”
The German sportswear label is responsible for Kanye West’s Yeezy line of sneakers and Pharrell William’s NMDs, amongst many other celebrity collaborations. The Yeezy Boost range, designed in conjunction with Ye, produced some of the most talked-about and sought-after shoes in recent history.
Adidas has done several collaborations with well-known designers, including Jeremy Scott, Alexander Wang, and Raf Simons. They have also reached out to several celebrities, such as Beyoncé, Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, and Stan Smith to create some of the company's most notable and coveted pieces.
Stella McCartney launched a joint-venture line with Adidas, establishing a long-term partnership with the corporation in September 2004. This was a sports performance collection for women.
Beyonce’s Ivy Park and Adidas have collaborated on several collections with the company site boasting the "[unity of] two iconic brands, celebrating their heritage while creating uniforms of power.”
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Chanel
With a snip of her ribbon-looped scissors, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel released women from their corsets and put them in fluid jersey suits and loose chemise dresses. “Nothing is more beautiful than freedom of the body,” she said. Chanel opened up a new world for her customers, in which they could dress and play as she did—like the boys. To the liberated legions shedding their mantles of feminine festoonery, Chanel offered wide-leg trousers, cardigan jackets, striped Breton tops, turbans, turtlenecks, peacoats, and, of course, the LBD (little black dress).
Paul Poiret, an early rival, was not kind: “Poverty deluxe,” he called the youthful, pared-down look that transformed women from overblown Belle Époque belles into sleek, bobbed-hair, modern women. But recognizing her influence, Christian Dior acknowledged that “with a black sweater and 10 rows of pearls,” Chanel revolutionized the way we dress.
Chanel died in 1971, and the house was managed by a list of forgettable names until Karl Lagerfeld took over in 1983. In the three decades since, he has manipulated and modernized the classic Chanel suit and many, many more of the brand’s éléments éternels, from the quilted bag, pearls, gold chains, and buttons to the camellia motif, black bows, and two-tone shoes. Although he shares with his predecessor a love of looks both lean and luxe, boyish and feminine, Lagerfeld has from the start taken Coco’s sacred codes and subverted them—mocked them, even, as he borrows from pop culture and injects a soupçon of biting wit.
The house of Chanel has had two masters, but as it sails into its second century, its signature has remained the same—bold, understated elegance. To borrow another Coco-ism: “Fashion passes; style remains.”
Lagerfeld worked at Chanel up until his death on February 19, 2019. The same day, the house name his longtime right-hand, Virginie Viard, as its new artistic director.
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Balmain
Balmain is a French luxury fashion house that was founded by Pierre Balmain in 1945. Pierre Balmain was "a king of French fashion" and outfitted stars including Ava Gardner and Brigitte Bardot, the Nicaraguan first lady Hope Portocarrero, and Queen Sirikit of Thailand.
Balmain’s elaborately embroidered evening gowns were particularly admired, as were his furs. He’d opened for business in 1945, not long after the liberation of Paris, and reigned during the ’50s, when all the world celebrated the spectacle of French luxury and elegance reborn.
When we look at Pierre Balmain’s Jolie Madame style and spirit—the impressive cuts, colors, materials and spirit of our founder—it’s very easy to see how he pushed fashion in new directions to reflect a new mindset. Pierre Balmain’s distinctive contribution to the postwar fashion was therefore a true reflection of the empowering spirit of that new age, when women were suddenly allowed to envision new possibilities and enter into new positions.
Christophe Decarnin was appointed as artistic director in 2005. Sparkling, strong-shouldered, micro-length, and often savagely deconstructed, Decarnin’s work sparked a craze christened “Balmania.” Even Michael Jackson caught the bug.
Olivier Rousteing joined the house in 2009. He wanted to orient the label towards the finer aspects of French couture. At the time of his appointment, Rousteing was a relatively unknown designer, and has brought a fresh take on the brand's aesthetic that remains to this day. He was credited with adding an Asian influence to the clothing, as Asia comprises a huge part of the brand's buyers. Celebrity friends like Kim Kardashian, Kelly Rowland, Jennifer Lopez, Rihanna, Björk, Beyoncé, Justin Bieber, Nicki Minaj, helped Balmain become the first French label to pass the million-follower plateau on Instagram.
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PHASE 1: THE CONCEPT
Students will choose a designer as inspiration for their concept and submit an essay and blueprints, concept images, or an inspiration board. Wardrobe must be "upcycled" using recycled, repurposed or natural materials.
- WHO PARTICIPATES?
- All students are required to submit a concept individually
- All students are required to submit a concept individually
- WHAT TO DO DO?
- Choose your designer
- State why you chose the designer and how their work inspired your concept
- Submit a blueprint, concept images/sketches, or an inspiration board
RULES: Your concept submissions will be judged on the following criteria:
- Strength of Theme and Concept
- Cohesiveness of Concept
- Composition of Entire Look, including Hair, Makeup and Fashion
- Presentation of the Essence of Designer’s Brand
- Artistic Interpretation
Concept submissions are due at 8:00AM (local time) on March 14, 2022
PHASE 2: EXECUTE THE CONCEPT
The top 5 student concepts from each location will be announced by 10:00 AM (EST) on March 18, 2022. The top 5 students will form teams to execute their concept and complete a photoshoot of their concept. This photoshoot will help communicate your vision with photographer, Nick Spanos, who you will work with in Phase 3.
HOW ARE TEAMS FORMED?
- The top 5 from each school will act as the Creative Director and form a team to help execute their vision
- Each team must have include:
- 2 cosmetology students
- 2 esthetics students
- 1 model*
*model must be a student and must participate in all team meetings and concept photoshoot to be eligible for scholarship. Non-Student models are not eligible for scholarship.
WHAT TO DO DO?
- Execute your concept, including hair styling, coloring, makeup, and wardrobe
- Conduct a photoshoot of your concept to share with your photographer (don't go overboard, iPhone is fine!)
- Your educators are there to help you through the process. Don't be afraid to ask for guidance!
- Submit your photos via a JotForm (to be shared by your educators)
Top 5 photoshoot submissions are due at 5:00PM on March 25, 2022
PHASE 3: THE PHOTOSHOOT
In Phase 3, the top 5 teams from each location will take part in an editorial photoshoot with Los Angeles internationally published photographer, Nick Spanos.
WHAT TO DO DO?
- On March 28th and 29th, each team will have a Zoom with photographer to finalize shoot theme, backgrounds, and needs for their shoot
- On the designated date for each location, Nick Spanos will be on-site at the Institute to conduct the 5 photoshoots from the teams for that location
PHOTOSHOOT DATES:
- Columbus - April 6
- Indianapolis - April 7
- Cincinnati - April 8
- Chapel Hill - April 19
- Los Angeles - April 21
VIRTUAL EARTH JAM
On May 18th all students and Institute team members will gather virtually for a showcase of the winners from each Institute and the announcement of the Grand Prize Winner.
PART 1: SUBMISSION SHOWCASE
- A video montage of each group's prep and photoshoot will be shown
- Each group's final concept image will be shown
PART 2: INSTITUTE WINNER ANNOUNCEMENT
- One team from each Institute will be announced as the winner from that location
PART 3: SCHOLARSHIP WINNER ANNOUNCEMENT
- One team from the Institute Winners will be announced as the Grand Prize winner, as chosen by a panel of beauty professionals, to be awarded a $2,000 scholarship for all team members *
*Scholarship to be awarded to each stucent upon successful completion of their respective program.