San Francisco Fashion Week '07: Gen Art
Even though Gen Art has been giving emerging artists a chance to showcase their talent for 14 years, the nonprofit organization didn’t start organizing fashion shows for San Francisco designers until 2004.
This fourth edition, spotlighting five designers, was high on imagination and irreverence. Designers had fun with their Spring 2008 collections and had no problem taking their lines to the edge.
That was seen in Amy Sarabi’s eponymous collection, which incorporated pleats that looked like the underbelly of a mushroom. They were seen in a petal skirt with a mushroom silk jersey top and a linen knee-pocket pant with a linen bustier and mushroom top.
Sara Shepherd fell down the rabbit hole and adopted an “Alice in Wonderland” attitude, with some of her creations looking as if they had visited the court of the Queen of Hearts. She was mad about taking fabric, slicing it into window- washer strips and molding it into artful designs such as a white corseted top.
Designer Michele Janezic took much of her fashion cues from vintage designs to create her self-named collection, called Janezic. Her muse for her Spring collection was British actress Jane Birkin. There was a carefree attitude to her brown-and-white plaid dresses, which fell a few inches above the knee. An ivory-embroidered, full-sleeve mini-dress with a slip seemed to float down the runway.
The husband-and-wife team of Lauren Berdell Podoll and Josh Podoll played with men’s and women’s fashion in their Podoll line. The men’s collection had a bit of a British schoolboy flair to it, with jackets paired with knee-length shorts in fabrics such as cotton hemp denim. The women’s collection was more glitzy, with sequins in racer-back tanks and dresses. A Japanese influence was seen in an origami zipper dress with large, triangular sleeves.
The nerd look was on full display in designer Matty Merrill’s Distilled line.
Models wearing goofy glasses strode down the runway in hoodies and denim knee-length shorts coupled with red-and-white–striped socks. Plaid and seersucker were popular fabrics for shorts, blazers and pants. —Deborah Belgum
