It’s a seven-day whirlwind of fashion shows, shopping events, art, and film embodying Vineyard vogue with a city-inspired élan. This rising event brings together shopkeepers and designers, models, volunteers and sponsors, lovers of all things fashion, and a nonprofit organization with wings.
It started out simply enough three years ago. Trena Morrison of Edgartown, who had left a sales job at Yves Saint Laurent in New York City for Island life (and love), was missing the ambient excitement of New York’s Fashion Week, and she thought: Why not have a Martha’s Vineyard Fashion Week?
The event has since grown to include four nights of fashion shows with professional models, trunk shows from designers near and far, an opening gala at the Harbor View Hotel in Edgartown, film screenings at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center in Vineyard Haven, a night of fashion and live music at Flatbread Company in Edgartown, and a fashion-infused art event at the Field Gallery in West Tisbury.
“There is a cult style on the Island that’s kind of hidden and not so cookie-cutter, and we have this way about us that is really cool and beautiful, and I wanted to express that to the world,” Trena explains.
While the event celebrates the aesthetics of fashion, it has broader goals. One is to support Island businesses, both by giving designers and storeowners a new medium to showcase their product and by adding an event to draw visitors to the Vineyard’s slower shoulder season. And from the outset, the event’s original organizers – Trena, Basia Jaworska Silva of Vineyard Haven, Marlene DiStefano of Oak Bluffs, and Richard Skidmore of Aquinnah – wanted to raise funds for a worthy cause. They chose Angel Flight Northeast, an organization of professional pilots who volunteer to fly patients to doctors’ visits and hospitals in situations where travel would be prohibitively expensive or physically overwhelming. Since 1996, they’ve provided around ten thousand flights for Vineyarders.
“I must say I was somewhat skeptical about it,” says Keith D’Entremont of Angel Flight Northeast, after first receiving a call about Fashion Week. “I couldn’t see how we were going to tie fashion into an aviation-based outfit. But you can’t not take a look at an opportunity…so I went down to the meeting in April, 2011, and it’s been a blast ever since – a whole new opportunity for our organization…a big win for us.”
On the ground, Fashion Week is a prodigious project: lining up stores and designers; booking venues; contracting photographers; transporting, fitting, and coiffing models. Volunteers do the lion’s share of the work, with no salaried members on the planning team and a lot of help from in-kind sponsors and the Island community. Store owners, managers, staffers, and designers put in long hours readying runway looks – sending pictures and getting approval from Trena along the way.
“We start by sketching everything out, figuring out what we want to do, what colors we want to use, and then we go fabric shopping and try to find the things that we want…or change our vision based on what we can find, then we start sewing…and [working to] make things to fit,” says Randi Sylvia of Oak Bluffs. She collaborates with her mother, Marlene DiStefano, to create the clothing line Kenworthy, which they sell out of their Oak Bluffs Arts District–based store, studioshop.
This year, Randi says, the Kenworthy look for Fashion Week will be “oriented toward what’s going to work in the store for winter....We’ve got a ton of fur that we’re going to cut up, so we’re doing coats with big collars and sweaters, for an elegant, almost forties look.”
“[Fashion Week] gets our clothes out there in a different way,” says Cassidy Look of Vineyard Haven, a sales associate at The Green Room. “People know about The Green Room, but the event allows us to showcase the store’s fashion sense and our versatility in a [runway] format that people wouldn’t see walking into the store.”
For venues and other event information, visit www.mvfashionweek.com.
