Four junior and senior girls are wrapping up their year of sitting on a teenage fashion board, offering merchandise feedback to designers, and getting an insider look at how the entire fashion industry operates.
Seniors Maureen McLennon and Caroline McNally and juniors Blaire Epstein and Taryn McCarthy were part of Nordstrom’s Brass Plum fashion board this past year.
The BP fashion board is annually-run and composed of approximately 20 high school students in the Bay Area who submitted applications to the Nordstrom store in Corte Madera.
The students on the board were expected to bring trending fashion ideas to monthly meetings, plan events, and work in the store with customers.
“There isn’t really any type of platform that I can express my interest in fashion and so when I heard about the fashion board I was really excited to see what it was all about,” Epstein said.
According to McCarthy, a main part of being on the fashion board is reporting to directors Emily Lepore and Claire Clavi about what types of clothes were popular at each of their schools.
“We give them the input about teenage fashion from the younger perspective,” McCarthy said.
According to McCarthy, this expectation challenged the students on the board to be observant at school, and study fashion trends of students their age in order to give input back to the directors.
“It was mostly just them getting free information from us,” McLennon said. “But being on the board gave us a lot of opportunities and experience in return.”
The board had the chance to see several guest speakers who work in different departments of the store. Each spoke about his or her experience of working in the fashion industry and gave the board tips on how to pursue successful careers at companies like Nordstrom.
McLennon said that the most interesting speaker for her was the representative in charge of the organization and layout of clothes at BP. McLennon said that she never knew how much thought went into the music, the lights, and the placement of the merchandise on the floor.
McCarthy said that she participated in the “Distress your denim” and “studding” event two weekends ago. Customers who bought denim clothing from BP were offered a free distressing or studding session where McCarthy studded the material or used tools to make the fabric look as if it was worn in and torn apart.
Though McLennon said the group is not paid to attend meetings, the fashion board representatives were paid an hourly rate by Nordstrom during events similar to the “Distress your Denim.”
While McLennon said that she was not able to attend many of the in-store events, she said she was given the opportunity to do some live modelling of BP clothes.
After picking out an outfit, McLennon stood on a mannequin platform in the store and modelled how the clothes looked in real-life. She said she stood there for a few hours and got a wide range of reactions.
“What I had to do startled some people,” she said. “But for others, they liked the change of pace.”
McLennon said that in hindsight, her experience while working at Nordstrom is going to help her find a job this summer.
“A lot of the retail stores that I have submitted job applications for have been really impressed that I have worked in a store,” she said. “Especially one as well-known as Nordstrom.”
