The best way to learn is from first hand experience and viewing. Jaqueline Herrmann, fashion marketing teacher, put this into full effect when she took all of her fashion marketing classes on a field trip to the Branch Museum in Richmond, VA. The Branch is a fashion museum that features many different styles of clothing and other fashions that are displayed for viewing. The Branch Museum opened officially as a fashion museum in 2013.
Although field trips are often associated with buses packed full of kids, the students each drove there individually, some of them grouping together to carpool.
“Driving separately kind of helped us feel more mature and more responsible for our own actions, which is a lot of what Mrs. Herrmann tries to drill into us,” senior fashion marketing student Natalia Bajaj said.
Bajaj attended the field trip and drove her car with a group of four other seniors.
Fashion marketing is a class built to prepare students for any future careers they will potentially seek.
“Whether or not we pursue fashion, Herrmann tries to make us as professional as possible so we are ready for any work environment,” Bajaj said.
The trip to the museum amplified the focus on maturity as each student or group of students that drove together had to arrive on time, stay together, and leave at an appropriate time that worked for them.
“More than just the responsibility stuff, the field trip really showed what you can achieve with not just fashion, but also hard work. A lot of the pieces we saw were really beautiful, and definitely took a long time to create,” senior Emily Plank said. Plank is another senior fashion marketing student that went on the field trip.
The majority of students who went on the field trip to the Branch Museum were from Herrmann’s senior sections of fashion marketing: Fashion Marketing II. Many of these students already work jobs, and all of them are preparing to enter the real professional world. The fashion marketing course puts a focus onto the hard work that real success takes.
“Seeing all of the work kind of inspired me, and I think the other girls that I was with, to want to work hard on something. I don’t want to go into fashion specifically, but it must be really cool to see your hard work come to life in front of you,” Plank said.
