Grit & Glitter: My RVA Fashion Week 2014: Part 8 Show #1 A Tour of Carytown Boutiques

Sunday April 27^th, 2014 at 11:00 a.m.

YAY it was finally time!! All the workshops and meetings and fittings were finally coming to fruition! I was so excited to get everything over with and hopefully get some good pictures out of it.

We were told to arrive at Salon Vivace for hair and make-up at 7:00 a.m. I decided that was unrealistic and silly for me (my reasoning being that there were several shows at different times that day, so logically the people in the earliest show would go first - I was not in the first show) so I arrived at 8:00 a.m. only to find make up artists, hair stylists, and about seven or eight models sitting outside the salon. Most had been sitting outside for over an hour (and keep in mind this was late April when it was still in the 50’s in the morning). Turns out no one in charge was there to let them in! So I'm very glad that I did not try to get myself up at 6:00.

The wonderful Josh Cruz-Magee of Salon Vivace did my hair. He was seriously the most fun person to work with. We joked around and laughed SO much. A new make-up artist (or at least someone who was in the process of learning) did my make-up. It took several tries, but we still had a good time and in the end I looked lovely. I wish I could remember her name! But we were never formally introduced (excuses, excuses).

We had to be to each boutique 30 min before the noon and 2:00 shows, so I got to Glassboat at 11:30 with the other models…and it was locked! I thought that was just a funny “Really??” moment for everybody. But they showed up eventually and we did the run-through. For this show, we did one runway walk up the length of the store and then went through four “scenes”. The scenes took place at furniture displays set up in different parts of the store. I thought this was a really cool idea, but it probably would’ve been a good idea to do a little more planning for each scene before the day of the show. Several us were blocked in shots, didn’t know where to look, and in the last scene I’m just straight up cropped out of pictures bc I had to stand too far off to the side. That’s kind of a bummer, bc like I said, I think the idea of “scenes” was really cool and should’ve made for great photos.

(Photo courtesy of Connecting RVA)

(Photo courtesy of Dawn Yilmaz)

Between shows, instead of watching the Ten Thousand Villages show, I decided to do something about my starving tummy. I stopped into Weezie’s for a quick brunch since it was on the way to Fab’rik. As I was about to leave, two of my fellow models came in because they were trying to grab a quick mimosa before our show, and of course it didn’t take much for them to convince me to join them.

Then we got to Fab’rik at 1:30 only to find that we had apparently missed the run-through for the show and had possibly (to be read: probably) annoyed the people in charge. It didn’t help that they didn’t do a great job of explaining how we were supposed to walk either. It wasn’t complicated, but somehow there was still a lot of confusion/questions (and not just from us, but the other girls, too).

(Photo courtesy of JC Vera Photography)

But it was alright in the end. We walked a square around the store, then stepped up into the front window where we had an organizer standing outside to motion for us to squish in so we’d all fit. After standing in window, we got down and went outside to stand right in front of all the spectators. Then we went back inside to stand in the window one more time and face into the store, and that was it! We posed for photos for awhile after and then we were able to leave and either go to Mezzanine for an opening day after party event or do whatever we want. I opted to call it a day. I had a long (fashion) week ahead of me after all.