Have you met Vlada, FSO and Lecturer in Human Ecology, and Collections Manager for the 23,000-piece Clothing and Textiles Collection? Spend the next two minutes getting to know her a little better.
Where is your favorite place on campus?
That’s easy: the Clothing and Textiles Collection. It’s an amazing teaching resource — we are so fortunate to have this next door to our classrooms.
Tablet or paper?
Paper.
Name one thing you’ve brought to work from home.
Pictures of me and my horses. It’s my other passion: I’ve been riding for 5 or 6 years.
What is the one thing you can’t live without?
Creating — sewing, designing, painting. It isn’t just one thing. You can’t teach students without keeping up yourself, and being creative.
If you won airfare to anywhere in the world, where would you go?
Italy. I’ve been there before, but there’s lots of history and architecture. I love the language, too. It’s one of my dreams to speak Italian.
You can invite anyone — alive or dead, real or fictional — to dinner. Who would it be?
Family and friends. It’s not really original… but they’re your closest people. It’s what I would love to do.
If you could switch jobs with someone else on campus for a week, what would you do?
I would probably want to work in another museum — maybe an ethnographic museum — to learn more about what we have here. We have something like 29 museums on campus.
What does “uplifting the whole people” mean to you?
It’s really hard to say specifically… the whole university, it’s what we do: by teaching, supporting teaching, educating people, and making society better as a whole. You do it every day, every minute.
If you could solve any problem in the world, what would it be?
Probably the production and consumption of textiles — slowing fashion down. With my students it’s a huge concern, the issue of disposing of used clothing. In the past 25 years, people in North America started consuming five times more clothing, and disposing of five times more clothing. We produce in massive quantities, and dispose in massive quantities. It’s a huge problem.
What 3 words best describe your U of A experience?
I don’t think my answers are anything unusual: everyone who comes here seems excited, happy, eager to learn more. I’ve been around the U of A for 18 years, and I just feel excited to be part of this community.
Vlada Blinova has been involved with academia, museum institutions, and the apparel industry both in Canada and internationally for 30 years.
She currently holds an academic position in the Department of Human Ecology as Faculty Service Officer. Vlada teaches textile and apparel design courses and manages The Anne Lambert Clothing and Textiles Collection, which houses more than 23,000 artifacts from around the world and spans more than 350 years of history.