May 11, 2009

Fashion Design Associate Professor Kathi Martin is the Director of the Graduate Fashion Program and teaches courses in swimwear, children's wear, drawing, CAD for fashion and textile design. With help from Fashion Design students and Dr. Xia Lin and his students from Drexel's iSchool, Kathi developed and launched the Drexel Digital Museum Project, an online archive of Drexel's Historic Costume Collection. The site features fashion by such influential designers as Beene, Balenciaga, Blass, Cardin, Pucci, DeLa Renta, Dior, Galanos, Givenchy and Valentino, all displayed on a virtual runway where the garments can be viewed from multiple angles.

Kathi is the guest design editor of the 2009 Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology (JASIST) special edition on design entitled Perspectives. Contributors include Matilda McQuaid, textiles curator, Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, and Jack Lenor Larsen, renowned textile designer and scholar. Kathi recently spent a week at Seoul National University (SNU) consulting on a digital fashion project involving fashion designers, musicians, engineers, digital media specialists and computer scientists from Korea, Scotland, Israel, Poland, Japan and the United States.She continues to work with Dr. Heyong-Seok Ko at SNU on virtual humans for fashion and historic costume.

In 2007, Professor Martin initiated a student travel tour for Fashion, Design & Merchandising and Interior Design students to Italy. The students visited the Vatican, the Palantin and the Valentino Retrospective at the Ars Pacis in Rome; the Uffizi and Ferragamo Museums and Scuola del Cuoio leather school in Florence: the studio of Achille Castigliani, the Triennale in Milan, La Mantera Textile Factory and Concept Store; and the Como Lake district. In 2008 Kathi led a group of students on tour in Paris.