Gen Art New Garde Fashion Show and Party
** Please note: this is a re-post from my previous blog **
Last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of attending the Gen Art New Garde Show and Party presented by Plastics Make It Possible. Gen Art, an arts and entertainment organization dedicated to showcasing emerging fashion designers, filmmakers, musicians and visual artists, attracted more than 1,000 well-dressed fashionistas (despite the terrible weather outside) to last week’s presentation, which kicked off New York’s Fashion Week. Celebrity attendees included Molly Sims, Jessica Stam, CariDee, Alex McCord and Whitney Port.
New Garde is a unique fashion week event in that, instead of celebrating the big labels, highlights the collections of three emerging designers in separate standing installations. Live models wearing the designs are staged in a unique vignette created by the designer, while industry and audience get an upclose and intimate view of the designer’s vision. This year, the honored collections were Sophomore, GAR–DE, Nomia and WesFeld.
By forgoing the traditional runway show, Gen Art’s approach of fashion installations pulsed with excitement. Different installations included one designer shooting the collection’s spring look book as the presentation and another with models taking turns on white blocks in a sparse but elegant. Admiring the collections amidst the crowd, Patron Cosmo-Polymer in hand, you practically feel the message from the collections swirling throughout night: the fashion world is in flux. There was a lot of experimenting with new and very old looks, suggesting designers are feeling the chaos of the outside world.
However, the WesFeld collection stole the show. Designers Wesley Nault and Daniel Feld, of Project Runway fame, are FIT graduates and the winners of Gen Art’s Plastics Make It Possible design competition. Nault and Feld drew inspiration for the collection from their favorite movie, What Dreams May Come. The result was a breathtaking (literally-people we gasping as the models marched out) seashell couture fantasy that proudly declared glamor has arrived. Despite being new to the scene, WesFeld has already worked on St. Vincent, Enya and Lady GaGa, and these rising stars will likely be dressing many more celebrity clients.
- Photo credit: GenArt.org
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