The 10 abayas were shown recently at VCU's annual student fashion show and are being shipped to Doha, Qatar's capital, for a fashion show at the VCU School of the Arts in Qatar.

The project is among a growing number of collaborations between students and faculty at U.S. colleges and their overseas campuses. In Doha, VCU's arts program is part of a higher-education consortium largely funded by the Qatar Foundation, a nonprofit organization run by the nation's ruling family. The consortium, called Education City, has its own 2,500-acre campus that also includes Texas A&M, Cornell, Georgetown and Carnegie Mellon universities.

In designing their abayas, the Richmond-based students worked with VCU's Qatari fashion design students and graphic designers in a cultural exchange of sorts. The U.S. students made their first sketches and sent them to Qatar for initial critiques. They then assembled revised sketches, instructions and sample garments and shipped them to Doha. The Qatar team critiqued and tweaked the designs, then had a tailor construct the abayas and had locals do the beading and embroidery. The garments were then returned to VCU for finishing and final embellishments.

The project was part of Kim Guthrie's "Give Me Shelter" class, during which her students discussed the idea of clothing as shelter and how different cultures address the concept of clothing.