Contributors: Avery Sefcik and Shannon Dugan (Richmond Studio)

Editor’s Note: Continuing our celebration of Fashion Week, this post features our dynamic partnership with VCU’s Fashion Design and Merchandising department.  The end result was some wonderful designs that we brought to life through amazing photography.  We’ll feature several of the designers, their work, and the photographs over the next few weeks.

Having a love affair with both fashion and architecture alike, I was positively elated when Shannon Dugan, Charles Luck Studio Manager for Richmond, VA, asked me to join her at a fashion show held in our swanky new addition to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. All in one night I’d have an exclusive first look at brilliant new architecture, exquisitely designed couture and illustrious art. A mad spin on the typical tale: the fashion would be coined by students of Professor Kristin Caskey of VCU’s Fashion Design and Merchandising department. Not quite piquant enough for your pallet? Try clothing fashioned from stone. Charles Luck, meet the dazzling minds behind tomorrow’s haute couture.

When Karen Videtic, Chairperson, Department of Fashion Design and Merchandising at VCU, spoke with Shannon about a possible collaboration of couture and stone, Shannon expressed utter enthusiasm. We are after all, a “Style-Minded Stone Company,” and we are constantly seeking a fashion-forward point of view. Just as celebrated designers like Ralph Lauren believe, fashion takes its cues from all over the world: art, beautiful automobiles, and yes, architecture and stone as well.

Months before that night of style and chic sophistication, flocks of students from VCU’s fashion department shot their way – photographically speaking – through our modern studio, taking note on everything from tile to granite slabs, cobblestone to semiprecious agate. Suffice to say, we were all aching to see the synthesis of stone and thread, two outwardly opposing mediums.

On May 7^th, 2010, VCU’s talent was set to take stage, and with a most enticing stage indeed: the new emphatically modern and minimalist addition to the VMFA. With stark, bone-white walls and expansive sheets of glass showering upwards to the sky, the new addition is quite simply breathtaking. Liberal amounts of white marble adorn the main, hollow hallway that narrows off to other wings, and add an air of elegance to the otherwise modern aesthetic.  Having been birthed to the public just days before, the building was as magical as a newborn, smelling sweet and bursting with life. The crowd took seat, aimed at a hovering glass bridge with dramatic staircase tapering its way down to a long white runway. The scene was out of a movie, and Shannon and I, dressed to the nines, were ready for a close-up. Just two rows away from the end of the runway, we sat, hungering for imminent eye candy.

After brief intros and thank-yous, light gave way to energetic darkness, and house music turned the massive hallway into a Miami club of fashionistas.  Spotlights shot through the darkness, awakening their tall, elegant targets. And so it began. Charles Luck happened to be the first line of clothing, with twenty-one designs making their way across the bridge of sighs, and down the stair to the audience below. The proverbial oohs and aahs could be heard throughout the crowd as masterpiece after masterpiece made its way effortlessly to the stage.

Oddly enough, what truly stunned me that night wasn’t the gorgeous architecture, or even the new additions of magnificent modern art, it was sheer creativity. The models that night, all beautiful in their own right, bore modern works of art on their own bodies. Young designers combined mesh-mounted tile with luxurious fabrics, and photographic prints with exquisitely-tailored jackets and tops. Patterns of colored tile adorned voluminous dressed and photo-prints of carved marble made for glamorous patterns. The ingenuity of the cuts, materials and blend of earthly elements with worldly style spoke absolute volumes of VCU’s immense and undeniable talent. With each strike of stiletto, models marched forth, drenched in style and art. The crowd basked in their luscious display, and when lights brought us back from the land of nod, we left still dreaming of capricious color, fanatical cut and ingenious design. And while I’m no Anna Wintour, I know style and quality when I see it. With VCU’s vision and Charles Luck’s enduring quality, the presented line was a revolutionary example of the merging of minds, materials and sheer cunning. Brava!

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