National foundation comes to Nashville to honor fashion students for Halston-inspired designs

With Love Halston Foundation brings its international Design Challenge to Lipscomb, awards four fashion design majors and features their work at event.

By Janel Shoun-Smith and Robin Ghosh  |  10/22/2026

Four fashion and design students were honored in October with recognition and monetary prizes from the With Love Halston Foundation, a national nonprofit founded to inform, inspire and support the next generation of fashion designers by uplifting the legacy of famed U.S. fashion designer Halston.

Fashion design majors Avry Earnshaw, Angelina Rodriguez and Reagan Sanders, earned a split of the $10,000 prize in first, second and third place respectively. Amaris McFarlane earned an honorary award of merit from the foundation.

Seven Lipscomb fashion students competed for the awards in the foundation’s Design Challenge, periodically held around the world in collaboration with the world’s top design programs including the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City and schools in Paris, Barcelona, Johannesburg, Philadelphia and San Francisco.

Each student was required to sketch an entire collection and to create one signature style from the collection. They also created a mood board and editorial photo shoot for the design as well as attending one-on-one mentor sessions with Audrey Schilt, a fashion artist and designer who started her career at Halston and later went on to work with Ralph Lauren.

The Design Challenge came to Lipscomb this fall thanks to a partnership sparked two years ago when the Department of Fashion and Design hosted a gala to celebrate the Halston legacy and the department’s Halston archive, which is one of the nation’s largest Halston collections including about 100 garments and 54 boxes of original patterns as well as sketches by fashion illustrator Joe Eula, runway photographs, press books, business materials and other items documenting Halston’s storied career.

At that time, Halston Foundation leaders Lesley Frowick and Brook Frowick Drummond, both nieces of Roy Frowick Halston, who rose to international fame in the 1970s by employing minimalism and clean lines into his work, visited Lipscomb to see the exhibit and get a personal tour of the archival items.

As an outgrowth of that, the foundation hosted its Design Challenge for Lipscomb’s fashion program and held an Oct. 17 formal event for Nashville’s fashion leaders in downtown Nashville, featuring a fashion show of the seven students’ signature designs inspired by Halston’s work.

As part of its own annual Fashion Week events in October, Lipscomb’s fashion and design department curated an exhibit of the students’ designs, as well as samples from their mood boards and photos shoots. 

The idea at the heart of the exhibition, “With Love Halston: The Next Generation,” now showing in the John C. Hutcheson Gallery on campus through Nov. 14, is to bring together the Halston archival materials with original garments created by the fashion students as well as artworks created in response to each design by Lipscomb visual art and graphic design students.

For Charlotte Poling, chair of Lipscomb’s fashion program, the collaboration gave students an opportunity to honor Halston’s legacy while developing their own identities as designers.
Their task was not merely to copy Halston’s work, but to explore what it can become in their own hands, she said.

The challenge for the students was to be able to say, “This is my work. I want it to look like me, but be inspired by Halston, not copy Halston,” said Poling. “It might be one component of the garment that is influenced by Halston, and the rest of it is very much the designer’s choice.”

The competing students spent time exploring Lipscomb’s Halston archive, studying original garments, patterns, sketches and runway photos — even turning garments inside out to understand how one of America’s most influential fashion designers constructed his iconic pieces.

The finished designs showcased a range of silhouettes, textures, and colors from nautical-inspired jeans to coordinated leather trousers and a trench coat, from a tulle skirt paired with a wraparound suede top to a flowing chartreuse pantsuit.

For first place-winning junior Earnshaw, the unique access to the archive offered a rare opportunity to study not only what Halston designed, but how he constructed it, she said.

“He was a genius constructor,” Earnshaw said. “One of my favorite things about fashion design is the construction of the overall garment. Looking at his pieces, trying to recreate some of them, I really got stumped on how he was able to achieve some of these things.”

“Every fashion student right now is trying to find the line between who am I as a designer, who is Halston as a brand, and where do those two things meet?” she said.

Earnshaw earned the judges favor, in part, by going above and beyond to travel to Halston’s home town of Evansville, Indiana, over fall break and create her required photo shoot on the main street of the town, said Poling.

Earnshaw’s red, print caftan-style design echoed Halston’s famous ability to drape fabric with few closures. It was also made from fabric purchased at a re-sale store, highlighting another aspect of the Design Challenge, sustainability, said Poling.

For Earnshaw, studying Halston’s work is also about understanding the past as a foundation for what comes next.

“It’s important to know the history of fashion so we don’t lose those techniques and styles,” Earnshaw said. “We can take those things and use them to design for the future.”

The rest of the Design Challenge participants were Kelsie Hanke, Emma Jenkins and Pomaikai Romano.

Some of the competing students drew from Halston’s use of color, while others responded to his shapes, patterns, fabrics or construction techniques, said Poling. “It’s translated differently for every single designer,” she said. “More than anything, they’ve just been pushed outside their comfort zone and encouraged to do something that they’ve never done before.”

Adding another creative dimension to the exhibition, each student designer was paired with a Lipscomb art student who created an original work in response to the garment. Art students who participated were Ella Baxter, Ella Crouch, Ellie Bowman, Sam Sowa, Regina Galvan, Ker Deng and Danalyn Damanska.

Sophomore studio art major Baxter, who partnered with Jenkins for the Lipscomb exhibit, found Halston’s restrained approach an interesting creative challenge. “He is very minimal, and I’m the opposite,” Baxter said. “I am a maximalist.”

Baxter responded to her fashion partner’s mood board, sketches and fabric selections while considering how materials such as fabric, leather and stitching could become part of her own work.

“It feels more like a game of ping pong,” she said. “We’re going back and forth building off of each other’s foundation.”

Designer Sanders was inspired by Halston’s relationships, especially with the “Halstonettes,” a famous group of models, muses and friends who formed the 1970s entourage of the designer, and the way those relationships influenced his work, she wrote in her artist statement. She also “drew inspiration from Halston’s use of microsuede and the movement and shape of his iconic sarong dress,” she wrote.

Sanders and her artist collaborator Damaska, wanted to focus on "friendship, connection and the way creative people can inspire each other,” so they used similar colors in their work and  the art piece incorporates the same feathers used in a boa for the garment design.

“Our collaboration required communication, flexibility and a willingness to adjust ideas so the final exhibit would feel cohesive,” Sanders wrote. “Together, the pieces reflect Halston’s close relationship with the Halstonettes and the way their friendships, personalities and presence became a constant source of inspiration in his designs.”

Baxter hopes that viewers seeing the works exhibited together will see more than a garment placed beside a work of art. She wants each piece to change how the other is experienced.
“I want there to be a solid connection between them, where they’re both enhancing the other,” Baxter said. “I want the painting to emphasize the garment’s details, and I’m hoping the garment can emphasize the details of my painting. I want them to create a beautiful balance together.”

Together, the archive, garments and artworks showcase a legacy that is not just being preserved, but continually interpreted.

For Baxter, that is part of the value of emerging artists engaging with historical work. “It’s not just something lost and forgotten,” she said, “but that can be remembered and reimagined.”
For Poling, seeing a new generation build upon that history offers something even more fundamental. “Hope for the future,” she said. “This is the future of design.”

“With Love Halston: The Next Generation” will remain on view through Nov. 14. The John C. Hutcheson Gallery is accessible 7:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 7;30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday.