Fashion Schools In

_ The Spring-Summer 2008 Tokyo Collection, the centerpiece of the annual Japan fashion week, opened Thursday in Tokyo, showcasing the latest works by renowned Japanese designers.

The event at Tokyo Midtown in Roppongi will feature about 40 brands through Monday. Participating designers include Koichi Chida, creator of Eupepomboo, and Noriko Fukushima, who apprenticed at Christian Dior in Paris.

The show, part of the fifth Japan Fashion Week in Tokyo 2007, will also host an exhibition showcasing works by young designers who studied at established fashion schools in Europe. .

Reel Talent: First Films by Legendary Directors

Few filmmakers make a classic on their first try. Most toil away in film schools, on weekends, scraping together friends, sets and ideas to fashion their student works. Often, the visions of future careers can be glimpsed in these movies built from blood, sweat and tears -- famously, George Lucas parlayed his Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB into his first feature-length project and of the 12 films included in this first-of-its-kind set, many future directors are seen fine-tuning tone and approach.

Split across two discs, Reel Talent: First Films by Legendary Directors is a smorgasbord of student films culled from the archives of the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. While it's quite a stretch to call every director included here "legendary" (Shawn Levy and Jon Turteltaub? Really?), this selection of a dozen short films is an uneven but fascinating look at the scrappy origins of many Hollywood power players.

Study-abroad appeals to many

Wearing brightly colored, squishy clogs in Paris might be fashion suicide, but it's a gambit Cassandra Thill is willing to take to polish her French, forge global alliances and learn the ropes of international marketing.For the next year, the University of Colorado at Boulder junior will study at L'Institut d'…tudes Politiques de Paris, better known as Sciences Po. Outside the realm of France's public universities, Sciences Po and other Grande …coles or “great schools" are said to produce most of the country's business and political leaders.“It'll be great," Thill said. “Just trying to explain Crocs and Nalgene water bottles - I just don't know if they'll quite understand it. If I see someone wearing Crocs, I might have to run up and hug them."

Teen fashionistas try industry for size at summer camp

NEW YORK (Reuters Life!) - While many U.S. students enrolled in sports or music camps this summer, a rising number of girls invested their time instead in a new type of program centered on catwalks and haute couture -- fashion camp.

Enrollment in fashion-related majors at schools like New York's Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons The New School of Design has risen in recent years, partly due to the popularity of reality television series based on fashion such as "Project Runway" and the hit movie "The Devil Wears Prada".

So fashion camps held in New York, Ohio, California, Alabama and Canada were seen as giving teenage girls with a passion for fashion the chance to see whether they wanted to seriously pursue a job in the highly competitive industry.

In New York, where about 169,000 people work in the fashion business, a group of 35 girls aged between 13 and 16 paid $1,095 each to join the first season of Fashion Camp NYC, comprised of five days of lectures, seminars and store visits.