Starting in early 2024, Fashion Magazine club – or, L’aimore, meaning wardrobe in French – is run by junior Beren Kamiscan and Mrs. Rogers, fashion marketing teacher and club sponsor. Publishing their very first edition in the spring of last year, it garnered attention from around the school and the club currently boasts over fifty members.
Covering a range of topics from the Met Gala and New York Fashion Week to recent, wearable trends, what started as Kamiscan’s MYP Personal Project has become a staple among the arts clubs here at Robinson. “I always had an interest [in] fashion, like, from a very young age,”, she said, regarding the passion that drove her to start L’aimore.
Yet, after months of planning and research, Kamiscan realized there wasn’t much like what she wanted to create out there. “I googled, like, how other schools had done it in the past, [but] I couldn’t find anything, that was like a ‘fashion magazine’ related to a school. It was always a ‘fashion club’. Yeah, I wanted to do that, but [I wanted] something more focused on publishing a magazine… that’s what I’m most passionate about,”.
The first meeting occurred in late February of 2024, introducing the club to students and identifying the three main ‘branches’ of the club – Journalism, Page Design, and Fashion Design – who each work together to create a cohesive magazine. Journalism would write the long-form articles and conduct interviews, page design does shorter-form content and designs pages for journalism’s articles, and fashion design would together lookbooks for students to model while learning to use professional equipment for, ideally, a quarterly photoshoot.
This wasn’t without any challenges, however – “We still had a good product, but it was kind of disorganized”, says Kamiscan, citing the big photoshoot as an area of struggle. “We planned [for] so long for only one photoshoot, and people just got distracted,”. Although she’s immensely proud of the final product, Beren recognized that the first issue wasn’t perfect, and plans to implement more goals for each team in the coming year to keep the L’aimore staff on track..
Despite these challenges, the very first issue of ‘L’armoire’ finally released digitally on May 24th, 2024. Kamiscan cites ‘Vogue’ and ‘Elle’ as two of her biggest inspirations, having issues of each in her personal collection. She notes how “they can bring it to life, with unique photoshoots and stories,”, and she hoped to emulate the feeling she gets when flipping through an issue in Robinsons own magazine.
Berens goals for the club this year are all about outreach. She hopes to get a domain for L’aimore, allowing it to be publicly accessed for individuals outside of the FCPS domain. Furthermore, she hopes to recruit new members to the magazine this year – she ”think[s] having more people join in, [the club will] be able to create something that’s much better… I think we accomplished something so much better and so much greater.”
If you have an interest in fashion, journalism, photography, or modeling, Fashion Magazine club is the place for you. To learn more about the club, follow their Instagram @robofashionmagazine – “If anyone’s interested in fashion, they should join!”