Designer Jamie Von Stratton modeling one of her dresses. Photo by Andrew Jacobs of Flying Trolley Cars

From The Stranger’s 2011 Worn Out Fashion Show, as photographed by Andrew Jacobs.

Fashion Show in Seattle this Friday!

I’m trying so hard not to be way too excited about it, but you have to understand…the Puget Sound is a desert for fashion events. Yes, yes, we have Seattle Fashion week, but it’s been my impression that it’s over-priced, poorly organized, and hosts mediocre shows. (Sorry guys! But that’s what I hear from all angles! Change my mind this year? Please?)

Plus, WORN OUT’s host, The Stranger, is my all-time favorite free publication that makes me laugh out loud on crowded busses. If The Stranger suggests it, it’s likely worth going to. If The Stranger is hosting it? Well, I’m sold.

I swiped photos and designer bios from The Stranger’s website, which are below. The ones I’m looking forward to seeing are (obviously) Jamie Von Stratton (everything she makes is a party), and Isaiah Whitmore (winner of Seattle Fashion Week’s student competition, and overall nice guy).

Enjoy!

Get your tickets while you can!

Start putting together your fashion show outfit!

Chris Jones
Like a Rockstar

What it looks like: A smorgasbord of bright patterns, shimmering fabrics, iridescent dress shirts, skinny flat-front pants, and slim-fit jackets. The inspiration is the Peacock Revolution of late-1960s London, when everyone was jacked on quaaludes and psychedelics, and for the first time, men stopped dressing like their fathers and chose a delightfully slutty look instead—copied from rock stars, who copied from working-class kids.

Worth noting: Jones has limited technical experience in sewing and pattern-making. But he’s bolstered by a brilliant tailor who understands his vision so vividly that, often, sketches or photos aren’t even necessary (Jones prefers to keep his tailor’s name private). When directing the style of, say, a jacket collar, Jones needs only to request that it look “more Mick Jagger 1972, less Brian Jones 1969.”

Miriam Reynolds
Clear Coated Rainwear

What it looks like: It looks like what you’re already wearing, because it’s entirely transparent vinyl rain gear—clear raincoats for now, but upcoming projects include hats and footwear accessories, such as rain guards for high heels. The see-through-ness brings charming design effects: The contents of pockets are revealed, and snap closures take on a look of what Reynolds calls “floating Skittles.” (And imagine the efficiency for flashers.)

Worth noting: Reynolds prefers shower curtains to bolt vinyl, because they wrinkle less and feel softer. The fabric yields absolutely no stretch, which presents an obstacle in getting in and out of garments—solved by the careful use of zippers and hems with adjustable taper. Seams are sparing because they hinder waterproofing—rain seeps into the tiny holes left by the sewing needle.

Ceair St. Onge
Gilded Artifice

What it looks like: Elegant women’s separates with hiphop influences and traces of sportswear: The tank tops have racer backs, a pant’s waistband is hand-gathered to suggest elastic, armholes are scooped deep and dropped to basketball-court waist level. But details stay subtle and fabrics are ritzy: The effect is more luxury than street. Gold turns up everywhere, in exposed zippers, snaps, and grommets, and in tiny gold chains in place of shoelaces.

Worth noting: St. Onge once enrolled in some courses at the Evergreen State College, hoping to learn how to make stage costumes. Somehow, the instructors never quite got to that. Instead, she found herself wearing a flesh-colored leotard and tumbling from a giant vagina made of tulle during an art-performance reenactment of a birth—following the instructor’s claim that “in order to design for the stage, you have to know what it feels like to be on the stage.”

Ramona Barnes
House of Mess

What it looks like: A sugary blend of mod elements and suggestions of antique doll clothes, such as Peter Pan collars and drooping silk bows. But the fabric is black, which changes the meaning: The looks become spooky and distantly enchanted, something you’d wear while wandering through a haunted mansion. The most technically challenging piece is a fitted jumpsuit of black stretch satin. Patterning pants is hard enough—a tiny waver in the crotch seam will cause them to ride up the ass. But jumpsuits must also accommodate the torso’s lengthwise measurement, or hell becomes real—excess fabric pools at the crotch.

Worth noting: Barnes coordinates a shared studio on Capitol Hill—a cheerful space stocked with good equipment and ready for company. At her station, there’s just one picture: a nature photograph of a lion, its face sopped with blood. The first time she saw it, she laughed and laughed, although she can’t explain why.

Isaiah Whitmore
Uptown Alice

What it looks like: Sportswear separates for men and women made from lots of different fabrics—a free-floating mix of colors, patterns, prints, and textures. Leather with silk, knits with fur, chiffon with mesh—everything clashes, but it’s the right kind of clash, and the looks stay structured, not costumey.

Worth noting: Every piece of fabric in the line hails from the Jo-Ann megastore in Tacoma—it’s the greatest, Whitmore says. His preference aside, Stitches and the Sodo Pacific Fabrics are good bets. Nancy’s has great stock, but if you can afford to shop there, you might be an asshole. In desperation, some designers turn to thrift-store sheets—but old bedding is marred by intimacy. Of course they launder it, but we’re told it helps mentally to work quickly and breathe through your mouth.

Alex Hancock
Decomposure

What it looks like: A moody women’s wear collection drawing on themes of torment and decay, with much tattering and blackness and clumps of hide—a perfect look for someone recently mauled and lying in a field, quietly waiting to die. There are lively art-school details: long, curving shapes resembling a rib cage, center back closures that tie into knotty segments like a spine. Hancock uses real fur, which intensifies the labor: Hairs get absolutely everywhere and sewing needles lodge in the tough hide. (Once they are really stuck, Hancock has to pull them free with his teeth.)

Worth noting: Past projects include a dress made of Saran Wrap. He started with a naked model, then wrapped her in loads of the stuff, carefully shaping the dense wads. (Did she sweat a lot? “Not as much as you would think,” he says, mysteriously.) Next up: garments made from crocheted panels. He’s got a staff of grandmothers working on them now.

Jamie Von Stratton
J. Von Stratton Designs

What it looks like: An assortment, ranging from bridal to cocktail to theater, with a focus on burlesque costumes in Von Stratton’s aesthetic: high-glam fantasy sci-fi, with vintage throwbacks and a nod to Judy Jetson. This includes, for instance, a backless, body-clinging, reveal-ready gown that represents Venus, all aswirl with purple organza and satin and sculptural gold-tone bust cups suggesting a midcentury sexy-alien look. (For upcoming projects, Von Stratton has collected metallic place mats, mirrored paper, and solar-cell panels because she loves their futuristic sheen.)

Worth noting: The rules of garmentry become twisted in the realm of the stage world: Interior linings, ordinarily kept private, are exposed during the disrobe—so they must be especially dazzling. And the costumes appear delicate, but they can’t be: They get thrashed when they’re so joyfully whipped off and flung around.

Mark Mitchell
It’s Mark Mitchell

What it looks like: A sampling of many talents, including a wispy bridal gown made of hammered silk, men’s custom-print denim jeans, and a satin party dress gleaming with strips of reflective bicycle tape. Embodying a glitzy wonderland, the costuming segment features showgirl burlesque and drag wear: Mitchell hand-applied a sprinkling of rhinestones to a sequined-paisley print, and his tulle jackets—gigantic, frothy mountains, really—bubble out from performer’s backs, like giant blurry carnations. You can’t imagine someone actually made these masses—they had to be forcibly wedged into the sewing machine during construction.

Worth noting: Mitchell created a tremendous red dress, so large and ferociously puffy that a special doorway had to be made to accommodate its entrance for the April 8 Worn Out show. Its finished bell measures about seven feet across, and its skirting contains 200 yards of tulle and diamond netting. (For reference: It takes less than four yards of fabric to make a suit for an average-sized man.)

Stella Rose Saint Clair
Stella Rose Saint Clair

What it looks like: A surreal collection of headwear, meshing vintage glamour and punk detailing. Each hat is quite different: heart-shaped, perched, floppy, some with giant bows and veils and faux flowers, and some without any of that. Saint Clair is a pleasant girl, filled with peculiar dreams, and she created this line to right wrongs she sees in the world: For example, there should be more turbans in it. Leather ones. Adorned with a jutting cascade of studs and spikes on one side.

Worth noting: In traditional millinery, the head blocks on which hats are built are made of wood—but they’re expensive, so Saint Clair just carved one based on her own measurements from a chunk of Styrofoam, using a kitchen knife, sandpaper, and Elmer’s glue. Now she knows what her head would look like if she were made out of Styrofoam.

Matt Noren
pun(c)tuationby Tarboo

What it looks like: Vintage work wear. There’s a special concentration on men’s and women’s button-front dress shirts, which Noren modernizes cleverly. His men’s shirts are less boxy than the standard cut, shorter, and with longer, slimmer sleeves. For women, classic button-front ready-mades are always upsetting, billowing out at the body while gaping at the bustline—unless you’re aspiring to a dirty-librarian-offset-with-wilting-grandmother look, you gave up on them long ago. Noren removed the bust dart altogether, and he added curvier side seams and a box pleat at center back. There’s no front buckling, even if you pinwheel your arms.

Worth noting: It sounds odd, but whether a top’s silhouette is narrow or roomy depends largely on the shape of the armhole. If you’re a dude and you want to look sleek, look for suit sizes that end in odd numbers, indicating they’re European. They cut their holes higher, so the fit is trimmer.

Davora Lindner & Camilla Eckersley
Prairie Underground

What it looks like: Highish-end wash-and-wear casuals for women in a good mix of structured fit and fluid shapes. Hourglass dresses, denim jodhpurs, and intricate jackets are topped with their signature—a puffy hood, cloaklike, dense with ruche. The garments are made using locally sourced material, which helps the designers survive economically on their small scale—they buy all their fabric in far cheaper greige form, meaning it arrives untreated and undyed. Only after a garment has been requested will they build it and apply its desired color.

Worth noting: Over the years, Eckersley has designed everything from couture to lingerie to leather fetish corsetry. Leather is especially tricky to work with, she says. Each piece must be cut individually to account for mottles and scarring, while some areas are stretchier than others, depending on which part of the animal’s body it once enrobed.

Maresa Patterson
Stella Love

What it looks like: Distant eras, appropriated from Patterson’s beloved collection of antique dresses. The silhouettes are familiar, ranging from cinched waists paired with full skirts to washy dust-bowl looks. There are far more solids than prints, lots of pleating, and not much lace—this daintiness is the trimmed-up kind.

Worth noting: When adapting a vintage pattern, Patterson has to fiddle with the bust darts, because today’s undergarments shape breasts differently than the ones our grandmothers wore. (Their look was hoisted and pointy.)

Cameron Levin
Chelsea

What it looks like: Tasteful cocktail dresses and separates designed to make girls feel pretty. Some pieces are spare and modern—loose cuts with airy fabrics—while a few classic silhouettes feel nostalgic but youthful, like a strapless bodice with poufy skirt. Levin details her gowns artfully. She uses flamboyant bits like feathers and strips of raw fabric, but she keeps the looks delicate.

Worth noting: Levin calls the line Chelsea because it not only refers to the art-industrial Manhattan neighborhood but also doubles as a girl’s forename, all feminine and sweet. It also distantly suggests the famous hotel and the wonderfully strange women who stayed there long ago, like Edie Sedgwick and the gorgeous Nico, her legendary skin “like milk and glass.”

And maybe others are catching on? Below are some backstage shots from Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Fall 2011 show, which actually manage to make gray hair look enviable. Love it! (Fun fact: it was Jean-Paul Gaultier who costumed all of The Fifth Element. Remember that one? How can you forget Mila Jovovich in what looks to be only white medical tape?)

A woman of action (and/or a woman of little to no sleep), Lady Gaga has designed a bracelet to benefit aid efforts in Japan. Each bracelet is $5, with all the proceeds going to Japan relief. Feel like donating more? You can adjust your total at checkout to take on more donated dollars.

Charitable-minded Little Monsters, unite!

“Slightly after daybreak, and heralded by a thick succession of fiercely shaken thunderbolts, the solidity of the whole earth was made to shake and shudder, and the sea was driven away, its waves were rolled back, and it disappeared, so that the abyss of the depths was uncovered and many-shaped varieties of sea-creatures were seen stuck in the slime; the great wastes of those valleys and mountains, which the very creation had dismissed beneath the vast whirlpools, at that moment, as it was given to be believed, looked up at the sun’s rays. Many ships, then, were stranded as if on dry land, and people wandered at will about the paltry remains of the waters to collect fish and the like in their hands; then the roaring sea as if insulted by its repulse rises back in turn, and through the teeming shoals dashed itself violently on islands and extensive tracts of the mainland, and flattened innumerable buildings in towns or wherever they were found. Thus in the raging conflict of the elements, the face of the earth was changed to reveal wondrous sights. For the mass of waters returning when least expected killed many thousands by drowning, and with the tides whipped up to a height as they rushed back, some ships, after the anger of the watery element had grown old, were seen to have sunk, and the bodies of people killed in shipwrecks lay there, faces up or down. Other huge ships, thrust out by the mad blasts, perched on the roofs of houses, as happened at Alexandria, and others were hurled nearly two miles from the shore, like the Laconian vessel near the town of Methone which I saw when I passed by, yawning apart from long decay.”

(Ammianus Marcellinus’s account of
the 365 AD tsunami in Alexandria)

You think your look is as good as all the editors and stylists that you see on all the streetstyle blogs? You think it’s no fair that it’s always the same people?

So listen up, Paris fashion week is on the horizon and it’s your time to unleash your inner Anna Dello Russo. If you want to immortalize your look via a streetstyle photographer, don’t leave home without these tips:

1/ BASICS

Streetstyle photographers react to the most simple of stimuli. So to excite their instinct, make sure to :

• Wear colors —> It makes for photos that pop.

• Wear nothing but black —> You’ll look like a fashion editor.

• Wear big sunglasses / Wear big corrective glasses / Wear a big hat —> The less you’re seen, the more you’re wanted.

• Wear heels. Super high ones OR/AND super bizarre OR/AND super colorful. If the heel is made of an old doorknob / legos / a stuffed animal, +2 pts.

• Mix improbable prints.

• Wear open-toed shoes without stockings in the snow / fur in summer —> dressing for the wrong season is very in fashion.

• Wear the pièce de resistance of the season. This season, it’s :

- A long skirt (make sure you have the burst of wind to go with)

- Anything from Prada.

- An enormous fur

- Leopard print (a little last season, but still works)

• Wear something wtf. —> Wear a shoe as a hat, make a skirt from your shower curtain, steal some construction worker’s uniform to go with your Jil Sander plastic bag. It’s miraculous how well these things work.

2/ ATTITUDE CHANGES EVERYTHING.

If you have only 2 of the 10 elements listed above, you still have a chance of getting a snapshot taken. The secret? Have the right attitude.

• Attitude #1 = Have a telephone, of course! But not so fast, don’t you dare talk, it doesn’t photograph well. Just listen, or even better, send a text.

• Attitude # 2 = Look busy! Have a fancy invitation in your hand (—> you’ve got somewhere to be)(You don’t have one? Just grab pretty much any half-sheet of paper and you’re set) and walk fast (—> your driver’s waiting on you, you’re so important) with the sense that you just want to be left alone, but not too much now (be careful to keep moderation).

• Attitude #3 = Hail a cab like a ballerina would dance Swan Lake. Long lines ladies !

PS : Are you arriving by taxi? NEVER get out right by the entrance, big mistake. Get out on the other side of the street at the very least. You need to give the photographers some time to find you.

WARNING : Anna Dello Russo gets there at the same time as you?

You’re gonna miss your entrance. Give her about 10 minutes to let her have her wow moment, that’s the least amount of time it’ll take her to parkour herself to the show entrance.

3/ IF YOU’RE DESPERATE

Streetstyle photographers are always attracted by other streetstyle photographers, no matter what outfit you’re wearing.

If you really have tried everything and you’re about to throw in the towel, bring a two or three friends with you with big cameras and have them run around in front of you taking your picture.

4/ IF YOU’RE REALLY DESPERATE

Find Anna Dello Russo, Giovanna Battaglia or Taylor Tomasi Hill and just attach yourself to them while they’re getting their pictures taken.With a little luck, you’ll end up in one of the photos. Hey, you gotta start somewhere, right?

5/ BUT BE CAREFUL, DON’T LOOK LIKE YOU’RE DESPERATE

Streetstyle photographers are like hunters : they don’t like too easy of prey, no matter how chic they are. Don’t platter yourself up, meaning, don’t just stand there in the position TAKE MY PICTURE in front of a show. Let yourself be desired. Or hey, even be uncooperative, it’ll make getting a good picture that much better – Everyone wants to get the perfect picture of Anna Wintour because she would never stop to have her picture taken.

6/ IT WORKED! YOU GOT YOUR PICTURE TAKEN!!! HOW TO NOT RUIN EVERYTHING…

• If they ask who you are, pretend like you can’t speak English, or French, or Japanese, or anything really. Just say your name and let them imagine you are the editor in chief of Vogue from the Federated States of Micronesia.

• If they ask you who you’re wearing and you don’t want to say it’s Target, even if it’s brand new, say vintage.

• Never ask where you’ll be able to see the photo (see “don’t look desperate” above).

PS : It’s useless to go parading yourself around in front of a night show. The lighting is terrible. Streetstyle photographers aren’t out at night, seeing as that’s photo editing time.

And then next time around, I’ll have to explain how to NOT Get Assaulted by a Horde of Streetstyle Photographers, because being a star of streestyle blogs is sais to be awfully exhausting. Big hugs!

Translation : Tim Sullivan