Each spring Gen Art puts on its annual Fresh Faces in Fashion runway show, highlighting as many as eight emerging Miami designers. This year the arts and entertainment company mixed up the traditional format and hosted the city’s first Fashionscape event, featuring living vignettes of just two clothing designers' collections. Nearly 800 guests attended the event Tuesday night in the Delano hotel’s poolside orchard.
“In some ways, runway shows have become a bit passé, so we’re switching up the programming this year and this is more avant-garde and more interactive,” said Gen Art Miami director Andrea Aberegg.
Aberegg worked with Gen Art’s national events director and fashion department in New York—where, along with Los Angeles, Fashionscape has previously been successful—to choose the two Miami designers to be showcased. Event designer David Glass then collaborated with designers Claudia Estrada and John D. Schoemann to create personalized vignettes to display the new collections for their clothing labels Claudiae and John David Collection.
Schoemann’s early 1980s style and the Delano’s oversize chessboard where it was staged inspired the design of his geometric vignette. Glass added black and white pedestals of varying heights and deep pink lighting to accent the space. For Estrada’s display, Glass used the designer’s own antique tea set as the centerpiece for the Japanese-themed English tea party vignette. The orchard’s marble table was set for a traditional English high tea, accented with Japanese elements like red candelabra, iron lanterns, and birdcages of various sizes.
Gen Art hosted a private hourlong preview of the collections for media, fashion industry buyers, and V.I.P.s before the event opened to the public. Models served as living mannequins for the designers, posing for photographers and guests within the 25-square-foot designed spaces just steps away from one another in the orchard. The designers displayed their first six looks simultaneously before each collection was in the spotlight for two songs, courtesy of DJ Ryan Evans. The models then changed into their second looks of the night for the remainder of the party.
Grey Goose, 944 Magazine, M.A.C. Cosmetics, vintage store C Madeline, and local media sponsored the event.
