On December 3, a fashion show at the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, took place through their teen program. All teenagers involved in the event and planning, attend many various high schools around the Kansas City area. The teen program runs several other events as well.

“We do open mic nights every month. Anyone can come and get up on the microphone and do whatever. We usually get poets or singers,” teen council member Ellie McRill said.   

   Preparation for the fashion show dates back to months prior to the event. A lot of time and effort went into making the fashion show run smoothly. 

“So for today’s (December 3) preparation, we got here at around 9am and started setting up until around 11am. It’s taken around 4 months to plan this whole thing and facilitate it all together. It’s been really cool being able to interact with a lot of different people, different designers, and getting to also work with a lot of different programs with the museum,” McRill said.   

   The inspiration for the clothing pieces and designs were based off of an art piece of the designers choice from anywhere in the Nelson Atkins museum. 

“So the first thing we had to do was go through the museum and find a piece of artwork to be our inspiration. I found Untitled (Still Life) by Suzanne Valadon and when I saw it, I wanted to kind of take a more literal approach because I was inspired by her life story,” Shawnee Mission North High School senior Kaleyce Majeed said. 

   Designers had the creative liberty to take inspiration from the art and make it their own.

“I was inspired by the color of the vase. My next step was to get the materials and things like fabric and then the process of actually sewing and putting the dress together took about 4 and a half weeks,” Majeed said.