EXPANDING THE CREATIVE LANDSCAPE: COPE NYC AT FASHION WEEK BROOKLYN

By Vida Sabbaghi, May 30th, 2025

In a world where art, fashion, and technology collide, COPE NYC’s involvement in Fashion Week Brooklyn represents a radical shift in the role of creative reuse, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration. As the netherlands worldwideorganization extends its reach beyond traditional exhibition spaces and into the dynamic sphere of fashion, its engagement with students, recent graduates, and professionals is creating new opportunities for dialogue on sustainability and innovation. At the heart of this initiative is an investment in the next generation of creative thinkers—students from the Harlem School of the Arts, including Amechi Chukwujiorah-Strange, Nana Adwoa Agyemang, and Maddie Trevor, who have, under COPE NYC’s guidance, transformed discarded materials into display mannequins for the runway. Through a process that 

underscores sustainability as a necessity rather than an aesthetic afterthought, these students employ creative reuse as a medium, challenging the conventions of fashion presentation. The result? Mannequins that are not just objects, but conceptual statements—commentary on the disposability of consumer culture and the potential of discarded materials to tell new stories.

This collaboration’s reach extends beyond students. COPE NYC has also engaged professionals within five years of graduation, offering them opportunities to work alongside industry figures and expand their portfolios while confronting the urgency of material consciousness. This initiative positions itself as a bridge between academic training and the demands of professional practice, embedding young designers in real-world applications of sustainability in fashion.

One of the most striking interventions in Fall 2024’s Fashion Week Brooklyn was a collaborative project between COPE NYC that involved landscape architecture, AI-generated design, and fashion. Landscape architect Si Chen utilized the AI platform MidJourney to collaborate with COPE NYC’s design team—including fashion designer Sherleen Montan—to create a series of suspended paper sculptures in off-white, an ethereal installation for the runway. These sculptures, which oscillated between organic and digital realms, raise pressing questions about AI’s role in design. Is AI merely an auxiliary tool for efficiency, or can it also function as a true collaborator in the act of creation?

photo (c) Shawn Punch

This question echoes across the broader landscape of contemporary fashion. Artificial intelligence has proven invaluable in forecasting trends and optimizing supply chains, but its relationship with creativity remains fraught. AI’s capacity to parse vast data sets and generate predictive models has reshaped how designers anticipate market movements, but can it replicate the human instinct for materiality, improvisation, and aesthetic judgment? COPE NYC’s engagement with AI highlights a nuanced approach—one that neither wholly embraces nor rejects the technology but rather investigates its potential as a means of expanding the designer’s toolkit.

Beyond designing the interior of the runway space, COPE NYC further deepened its community engagement by inviting students from Bedford-

Stuyvesant New Beginnings High School to design a fashion line for the show and model their creations. Led by their teacher, Ms. Corbin, these students not only explored the intersection of design and self-expression but also built a body of work to diversify their resumes and portfolios. “I want you to know how impactful the experience of our children participating in Fashion Week Brooklyn with COPE NYC has been on our students and their families,” Ms. Corbin reflected. “Several parents [have] expressed how proud they were of their children for being part of such a wonderful event.”

“She went on to share that this visibility has inspired students to take their engagement further; those who participated in COPE NYC’s multi-faceted approach to fashion will be joining the school’s Fashion Enrichment Program and are now planning to start a fashion club.” By integrating students, emerging professionals, and seasoned designers within a single framework, COPE NYC is not merely responding to industry shifts—it is also actively shaping them. It is within these experimental spaces, where sustainability meets technology and art meets function, that new paradigms of design begin to take form.

Recognizing that fashion education can sometimes be disconnected from real-world practice, COPE NYC strives to present a dynamic alternative, one where learning, making, and innovating seamlessly intersect. The runway, in this case, goes beyond a stage for presentation; it becomes a site of inquiry, pushing forward the conversation on how we create, consume, and reimagine the materials that define our world.