Pittsburgh’s Fashion Week gets a new name
The Downtown Community Development Corp.’s take on fashion week is getting a makeover ahead of its event lineup slated for Sept. 18-21, including a name change and new additions to its core planning team.
For its first two years, it was called Fashion Week Downtown, a nod to its festivities being held throughout the Golden Triangle. Moving forward, it will go by Pittsburgh Fashion Week. Longtime model Miyoshi Anderson used that name for six years for her week of fashion-focused events across the city. After she canceled her fashion week in 2016, the DCDC trademarked it to prevent other local events from adopting it.
“It simplifies things to call it Pittsburgh Fashion Week,” executive director John Valentine says. “For me, the big goal is to make this one big happy family of a fashion community.”
When Ms. Anderson discontinued her event, he rolled out another version of it to make sure her efforts to promote Pittsburgh’s fashion talents continued. He hopes to try to elevate it this year, with help from Elysia Newman, whom he’s tapped to serve as creative director, and Suzanne Mauro, who’s come on board as the fashion show producer.
Ms. Newman is the founder of Style 412, which started in 2016 as a monthly discussion series for the city’s style influencers. Information and ideas exchanged during those meetups were compiled into a report on the state of Pittsburgh’s fashion industry that Style 412 released last summer. Since then, it’s
become a nonprofit with a board of fashion professionals who aim to connect the city’s designers, stylists, photographers and the like with resources they need to grow their careers. By day, Ms. Newman works in marketing and branding.
She replaces Brookline native James Houk, who was named creative director in late 2017. He resigned this spring to pursue other design jobs, including a partnership with Walmart, which require him to split his time between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles.
Ms. Mauro brings to her role a background in visual merchandising, styling and trend forecasting. She’s also an instructor at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.
Both are focused on improving the quality and diversity of Pittsburgh Fashion Week’s programming.
“We want to try and start over and build the brand from the ground up,” Ms. Newman says. “We need to put more structure and processes into place to allow not only for more people to come on board to help but to be held accountable to do their job.”
Selecting venues and planning the schedule are still works in progress, but more than 30 designers have already applied to be considered for the fashion show. A committee will select who will be featured in September.
“This is about wearable fashions and showcasing good, quality fashion in our city and hopefully educating those designers and telling them how they can make a living as a designer,” Ms. Mauro says. She wants to add a panel discussion to the mix to give local designers a chance to network and learn more about how to make a viable living from manufacturing and selling their collections.
The official lineup and a call for models will be announced in June. To learn more, visit www.pghfw.com.