GPSA hosts Black Friday Fashion Show in honor of Black History Month

With strutting models dropping jackets, a surprise vocal performance and a DJ hyping up the crowd, the Graduate and Professional Students Association hosted its Black Friday Fashion Show in honor of Black History Month in the HUB-Robeson Center’s Freeman Auditorium Friday evening.

GPSA, in collaboration with the Bank of America Career Services Center and singer and reality television personality Alana Morrison, ran the event for two hours.

GPSA Jada Quinland said the show aimed to celebrate more than Black history, but also Black people as a whole.

“With everything happening at Penn State, I think being able to celebrate different cultures… is really important to Penn State and GPSA,” Quinland (graduate-international affairs) said. “We were kinda testing the waters and seeing how many Black History Month events were happening and wanted to add our two cents.”

Quinland explained that GPSA worked with the Bank of America Career Services Center and its Professional Attire Closet to bring awareness to resources and to educate on upcycling “old fashion” to “reinvent pieces.”

“Not every model had on everything from [the Professional Attire Closet], but the majority of pieces the models were wearing were from [there],” Quinland said. “We are just trying to show, specifically [to] the Black community, that the [Professional Attire] closet and thrifting can be really reinventive.”

Frankie Urrutia-Smith, the GPSA speaker of assembly, shared a similar sentiment and said the fashion show was “great.”

“I think access to resources that a lot of students — especially graduate students who don’t often know they have access to on campus — is something to make people aware of,” Urrutia-Smith (graduate-history and women’s, gender and sexuality studies) said. “Making people cognizant with something very celebratory and upbeat is something I love. It was a success.”

The Black Friday Fashion Show began with Morrison welcoming the audience and introducing the show’s theme of “Black Resistance.”

The first segment of the three-part show featured nine models, each of whom showed off one outfit.

In the next part, Morrison performed three songs, including “I Want You” and two unreleased tracks. Following a small session of the audience singing to the songs the DJ was playing, the fashion resumed with the same nine models returning in new outfits.

GPSA delegate Sunshine said the event made her day.

“It was amazing. I was feeling low coming into this, but energy is completely changed,” Sunshine (graduate-human development and family studies and demography) said. “The models were getting me hype. It was really lit, and I really enjoyed it.”

Urrutia-Smith noted that the Black Friday Fashion Show could not have happened without Quinland’s efforts.

“This is really Jada’s baby. She puts in so much work for the grad student body, and the overall student body in general,” Urrutia-Smith said. “I love that she’s wanting to pull student organizations into celebrating Black History Month, Black excellence [and] Black culture.”

Sunshine said “a lot” of effort had been put into the creation of the show, and that Quinland has “done so much as president.”

“We’ve been planning this for a couple of months now, and it’s been really great that Alana Morrison was able to come and help out with this,” Sunshine said. “Getting models was difficult, but we were able to do that in a very diverse way. I’m happy that everything came together at the end.”

Quinland said she felt the show connected with the crowd on an “intimate” level, and that the event was everything she had envisioned.

“Honestly, I just feel blessed,” she said. “I’m grateful for the models and our host, who charged us less than she would usually do. Although the whole auditorium wasn’t filled, it was cute and intimate, and it made me very content.”