The Past Recaptured 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 onceperennial 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.
Sketching in class, 1947.
In 1951 , still in the top two floor s of the Central High School of Needle Trades, FIT offered cour ses in a cutt ing production laboratory. Here, students learned how garments were made (the men wore ties, of cour se).
FIT relocated to its first building on 27th Street in 1959. Many yearbook captions alluded to the move.
In 1962, Antonio Lopez, Illustration ’62, who went on to become the legendary artist known as Antonio, served as art director on Portfolio. His partner Juan Ramos, Interior Design ’62, shares a smoke with a pal here, as Antonio looks on.
26 Winter 2020
Bookstore, 1963
