FASHION WEEK CELEBRATES LOCAL TALENT

Ask the average tourist, and they would likely not guess that Nashville fashion goes beyond denim and the deals they’ll find on cowboy boots along Lower Broadway. But the Tenth Annual Nashville Fashion Week, taking place from March 31 through April 4 at OZ Arts, is setting out to prove that the Music City’s talents go way beyond just music. I had the privilege of talking to NFW’s co-founders and managing partners, Connie Cathcart-Richardson and Marcia Masulla, to get their perspectives on how this tenth Nashville Fashion Week will be like nothing we’ve seen before.

Will: Tell me a little bit about the history of Nashville Fashion Week as you kick off your Tenth Anniversary.

MARCIA: The mission since day one has been to educate local and national audiences about Nashville’s growing fashion community and our city has experienced the results. Nashville Fashion Week and the Nashville Fashion Forward Fund have helped raise awareness of our creative talent by showcasing 180 designers and hundreds of local businesses with an investment of over $1.3 million in the local community over the past nine years. NFW could not continue to do this year after year without the support of dedicated sponsors, volunteers and ticket holders. CONNIE: Nashville Fashion Week was co-founded by a collaboration of fashion, media, and marketing professionals that partnered to combine our passion and resources to create a completely volunteer-led, run, and managed event to spotlight Nashville’s growing fashion community with an ongoing, sustainable focus for philanthropic sup

port of our creative community. For the first seven years, we changed locations every single night as a way to pair both emerging and historical Nashville neighborhoods and projects with fresh designer talent. In 2011, our opening night runway event kicked off high above the city at the yet-to-beopened raw space in the Pinnacle Building. That first year we moved around each day with runway shows at The Arcade, War Memorial Auditorium and at the Crystal Springs Baptist Church in East Nashville with Christian Siriano as our headline designer. Our runway show footprint has also included The Parthenon, Trolley Barns, Belmont Mansion, shutting 5th Avenue down, the Bi-Centennial Amphitheater, the Veranda at Union Station and Legislative Plaza in front of the Capitol. These unlikely locales are just a few of the fifty locations that we chose to spotlight our city.