All Friday nights should be as good as this past one was for fashion events in Buffalo. The Runway and the opening party for The Jenny Shop? I’m sorry, but can we do this again next weekend, too? Jen Hemmingway (here with customer Marcia Gerace) opened a great shop for those who are hungry for chic. Add to that the fact that she is in the Ellicott Square Building. I mean, downtown, stylish, and not a government agency or coffee shop? I’d say she has stones, but she is too darn adorable. So I’ll just go with smarts. Her shop is a manageable size with affordable lines that are sufficiently diversified to satisfy many tastes, but the overall look is still focused. Her opening party was Friday, packing a section of the building into overflow. I went with the specific purpose of buying a Mac & Jac jacket I had spotted during set up. Well, in the words of one attendee, the guests were “cleaning her out.” In the process someone bought my jacket.
I found something else. I always do.
I rushed back to my illegally parked car (Bison’s game) and headed up to the Albright-Knox Clifton Hall for a Fashion Show by the Buffalo State College, Fashion and Textile Technology Department. The mood was electric. I passed a long line of SRO hopefuls and security folk, then moved down the jammed corridor and up stairs where I was greeted by walkie talkies and clipboards.
I felt so at home.
Nothing says Runway like everybody wanting to get in and a staff of don’t mess with me-looking professionals determined to maintain order. My heart started to thump. I had come with no idea what to expect, but at this point I realized that the event had potential.
I was not disappointed. I walked into the main staging area, and there it all was: black ensconced runway, white wooden folding chairs set up in rows and at right angles, precise lighting, goodie bags at the base of the front row seats, VIP seating, film crews, big lenses, a handful of stunningly gorgeous male and female somebodies milling about, non-stop deafening talking, dance club music, more security, and waiting, waiting, drama, and more waiting. Spot on. We could have all been in one of the tents at Fashion Week in NYC except for one thing: I got a chair. I wasn’t shoved into a cordoned-off riser at the end of the runway with the rest of the photographers. Then a man with some rank in security (you can tell because they never have the matching jacket, just the ear piece) came in, and pulled a couple of no-nonsense moves that told me the gate had closed. No matter who you were, if you weren’t inside at this point, you weren’t getting inside.
Then the lighting changed and the music took a breath before picking it up in another direction. The show was about to start. Then they came, students wearing outfits that they had begged to borrow from area retailers. There were some female models who knew how to make clothes move and to stand long enough at the end to give it up for the cameras - or classmates. Others, not so much, but even on this issue, the ratio was about the same as in New York. Not every professional model no matter how skinny or styled makes it with the cameras. I watch the dull ones in NYC, the models who are doing this for a living, and think, “This is your career and you skip the lenses. What are you thinking? Are you capable of thinking?” Here, there were no dull ones, maybe some nervous ones, but every model threw something out during her walk. And the male models fell into one of the two categories also seen in NYC: Sex or hot thuggery. One is all movement or intentional unkempt, while the other walks with the purpose of an cool assassin, puts on a stone face, and takes a wide stance at the end of the runway.
Absolutely perfect.
The designers at Buffalo State also got a big chance to shine, with models showing six to eight of their creations. However, the format made it impossible for me to comment on the contributing store’s fashions and difficult to address the student designer’s collection. Unlike in NYC, not all things were temporally sequestered and names weren’t affixed to the backdrop. And although some of the student designers had headshots and bios, I didn’t seem to have complete information. On the other hand, the event went on almost four times as long as what I am used to and never sagged. Something about the heady flow allowed it to work. So whether to change it and slow it down? Who knows. That could be so wrong. I sneaked backstage afterward to try to connect some of the dots, but instead of hair dressing stations and thirty clothes racks, I found large elevator doors that screamed efficiency and disappearing acts. Again, the smarts of it all.
“I wasn’t sure this was going to happen, I heard so much noise about it while they were getting ready,” one woman said to me at the end. I asked if her son or daughter was in the program. “No, I’m faculty,” she answered. But that’s just it. The same drama exists in every show, right up until the designer takes his or her bow. It’s all about the drama, and a whole lot of work for a very short but voltaic performance.
Erin Habes (Sweet & Dirty), teaches Fashion Show Production at Buffalo State College and directed the program. So well done, Erin and all.
