Brigham and Women’s Faulkner-Sagoff Breast Imaging and Diagnostic Centre combined fashion and fund-raising at Runway, its first fashion show competition, held Thursday night in the InterContinental Hotel Boston’s Rose Kennedy Ballroom. With more than 400 guests, the Faulkner-Sagoff Centre exceeded its $400,000 fund-raising goal for the evening while simultaneously promoting the work of five local designers from the School of Fashion Design.
“We set out to create something completely different from anything we had ever done or seen done here in Boston,” said Anne Vanderheyden, development events associate at Faulkner Hospital, who oversaw production with Rafanelli Events. “We decided to give ourselves plenty of time to recreate our annual fund-raising event, so we spent 18 months carefully and strategically planning. As our honorary chair, Gretchen [Monahan] was fully onboard with the new idea and was able to put together a fantastic panel of judges from the fashion industry.” Runway marks the facility's 14th fund-raising event. Previous incarnations were typically of the dinner-auction-dancing variety.
Rafanelli Events channeled Project Runway with bio videos for each of the designers, who competed for a trip to New York Fashion Week with the evening’s host, Boston-born style maven Monahan, a coach on the TLC show A Makeover Story. “We tried to build a foundation to show off each individual designer’s work,” said Bryan Rafanelli. “The challenge was to showcase their personalities, inspiration, and perspectives as designers. Project Runway has 14 episodes to do that; we had one night.”
The three-minute behind-the-scenes videos profiled each designer and the production of their five-piece collections, and were shown on the stage's five vertical screens. Following each video, that designer's collection was shown. Guest judges included local TV personality and jewelry designer Tonya Chen Mezrich, Boldfacers.com founder and editor in chief Lisa Pierpont, and two Project Runway alums, Kevin Christiana and Emmett McCarthy.
After the fashion show, the Centre honored Men with Heart, a group of men committed to fighting breast cancer, who took their own spin on the runway, clad in their signature yellow T-shirts.
In addition to the $500 tickets and a live auction, a fashion-centric raffle helped raise funds. Planners went high-tech by using iPod Touches for guests to scroll through the list of gift certificates up for grabs, which included Akris, Cynthia Rowley, and Boston designers Daniela Corte, Sara Campbell, and Denise Hajjar. For every $100 spent on raffle tickets during the cocktail hour, Monahan donated treatments from her salon, Grettacole, to Faulkner-Sagoff patients.
