Dreaming and designing
“This is going to look just right,” says Elissa Levin as she wraps a navy blue sash around her body and skips a couple steps across her hardwood living room floor, which is covered in pieces of fabric.
It’s just after midnight, three days before the WMPG fashion show benefit, and the 22-year-old political science major is busy putting the finishing touches on a piece that she’s designed for the event, held last Friday at the SPACE gallery.
The young designer is passionate about sewing. She’s dressed in a frilly black knitted top with a large black and white skirt that grazes her knees. The skirt is belted and her hair is pinned.
It’s late, but she looks like she could be ready for an appearance at a chic cocktail bar. Her personal style, she says, is something that influences her work.
Levin’s goal is to create beautiful pieces without wasting anything.
The entire bottom-half of a black party-dress is bulging with what looks to be hundreds of pieces of colorful scraps.
“They’re all old tee shirts,” she says with a smile. “I really believe in using what’s lying around, instead of consuming more and more. Art should not be wasteful.”
Levin returned to USM last semester after she spent two years in Cape Town, South Africa, where she got much of her inspiration.
She has given names in African dialects to each of the three pieces she is putting in the fashion show. The piece made up of so many scraps she calls Emasithandane, which means, ‘we must all love each other’ in Gauteng.
It also happens to be the name of a children’s home in South Africa, to which Levin plans to donate the proceeds of her dresses if she sells them.
Direction from downstairs
In the basement of SPACE on Friday night, Elissa Levin and twenty other designers are finalizing their finishing touches for presentation in the fashion show. They’re all visibly sweating.
Backstage, Levin is pinning and spraying the brown locks of USM photography student Sarah Reece, attaching tulle here and there.
While most of the models got their hair and makeup done by professionals from Akari, who were on-hand to doll up models a few hours before the start of the show, Reese arrived after they’d packed up.
“This dress is so full of color and excitement,” Levin instructs as she wraps and teases pieces of the model’s hair, “but you’ve really got to work it with your walk, come out with so much energy, because without it, the dress won’t scream like it should!”
Sarah agrees with a squeal of excitement. Clearly, she’s thrilled to be ‘working it,’ and it’s almost time to take to the catwalk for a quick-run through before the doors were opened to the public.
The 8 p.m. dress rehearsal is the first time the models are taking to the runway and learning their place in the run-list for the 9 p.m. show.
Lights, camera.
The runway, raised about five feet off the floor, follows halfway down the right-hand wall of SPACE Gallery before turning and jutting into the crowd, who is standing around the catwalk on both sides for the fourth annual WMPG fashion show.
The event, as planned, is packed to capacity, something that organizer Paul Drinan has come to expect.
He’s been helping with the show since it’s beginning in 2005, and has taken on more and more with each show, this year directing and producing the event.
His background in event management, he says, has included working at the Oscars in L.A. and Civic Center-sized functions with thousands of people involved.
The former professional model has been trained for the runway, and has walked catwalks in nearly every major city in the country, so he took it upon himself to train the models who wanted pointers during the week before the show.
Downstairs, designers comb their models for any flaws in their garments or pace for the catwalk; champagne comes out and toasts are made between designers and models; groups of women are lacing corsets and talking about quick clothing changes or feverishly debating between shoes.
Photographers sparkle the gallery with flashes. Run-lists are corrected, and the lights go down over the crowd.
Ready to call it a night
“This was the best show yet, by far,” says Drinan, the event producer at the end of the night. He credits new theatrical lighting for making the show really punch. “In terms of attendance and the production itself, best show yet.”
WMPG’s own Goober (Michael Manning) and Caitlin Corbin stepped up on the day of the event to DJ the evening’s show, something Drinan commends.
Confusion during planning had left a hole in the program, leaving music in the air until the last minute.
The audacious, self proclaimed “promoters of awareness and discussion underrepresented in mainstream media,” WMPG has done it again, holding a bustling gala that represents local designers and the art they produce, from their hearts and hardwood floors.