Though Steven Fischer’s vision for a Center for Image, Style & Design at Northwestern was eventually denied by the Office for Research, Fischer called the two-year process to get the center approved a success.
“We didn’t fail,” said Fischer, the associate director for the MMM program at NU. “Not at all. We did not fail in doing this. The fact that we were able to do this, the fact that the vice president of research for this University listened so carefully to this idea, that’s a success.”
Fischer and others got the idea when then-Bottega Veneta, now-Gucci President Patrizio di Marco spoke at NU on Oct. 30, 2008. Students from across campus showed up to hear di Marco speak.
“We sensed a lot of electricity in the room that day, ” Fischer said.
Fischer began reaching out to students to see if they were interested in a research center, originally called the Center for Fashion, Style & Design.
To Fischer’s surprise, within six weeks more than 550 students from every school in the University said they were interested in the proposal and shared areas of research they wanted to investigate.
Fischer decided to send the proposal to the University’s Office for Research because the project was interdisciplinary. He worked closely with Jay Walsh, vice president for research, who was not immediately available for comment. Officially proposed in May 2009, the proposal was the only one retained by the Office for Research from the 2008-09 school year for further consideration, Fischer said.
The name of the center was eventually changed from Fashion to Image in order to encompass a broader range of possible research opportunities, Fischer said.
McCormick junior Aditya Kumar said he helped draft the initial proposal.
“It was something that I hadn’t seen anywhere else,” he said. “I thought it would be cool to get involved.”
Working with a team of three Kellogg graduate students and using guidelines from the Office for Research, Kumar helped submit the initial proposal. Fischer said the office called the proposal “one of the very best proposals they’d ever received.”
“Because we had so many students involved with this and the faculty we had involved and the quality of the proposal-those three things-that’s what caught the attention of the Office of Research,” Fischer said.
Michael Marasco, director for the Farley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, said because the Office for Research spent so much time considering it, the group had a very strong proposal. Though he wasn’t directly involved in the decision-making process, he said the proposal had very strong student support.
“(The Office for Research) wouldn’t go through the effort they went through if they felt it wasn’t a fit,” he said.
Kumar said the center offered a myriad of research opportunities he found fascinating.
“When you think of fashion, you think of a pretty qualitative, touchy-feely subject, right?” he said. “But the center offered the opportunity to quantify some of the elements of fashion and have a more empirical understanding of an industry that basically didn’t have it.”
For example, Kumar said a research team could empirically look at how hospital gowns impact patients and whether the fabric used may contribute to infection.
Though he said the denial was disappointing, the economy and “all sorts of things” got in the way of approval. Fischer said he learned about NU throughout the process.
“I want people to know that they can explore ideas in this way here,” he said. “It can happen. Students are listened to. It may not be the result you want, but the process we went through was so incredible, wasn’t it?”
