4 Reasons for Locals to Love New York Fashion Week

Once again Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week is fast approaching and come February 9, the usual slew of designers will showcase their fall collections in New York at the Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park. Even if you’re not one of the many Bay Area-ites jet-setting over to New York, keep some champagne on hand, as several local companies are live-streaming fashion week events. Here are 4 reasons San Franciscans can start getting excited for the fury that is NYFW:

1. Independent Fashion Blogger Conference, February 8, 2012 at Milk Studios, NYC

IFB Conference 2012

IFB Con 2012 takes places on Feb. 8 in New York

For evidence that fashion bloggers have become a marketing force to be reckoned with, watch the IFB Conference live. You’ll spot some of the fashion industry’s best and brightest personalities come together to discuss issues, challenges and  trends facing fashion bloggers and the brands they work with, as well as the changing the landscape of fashion and social media today.

2. Polyvore LIVE presented by CoverGirl , February 13, 2012 at La. Venue, NYC

Polyvore LIVE

Polyvore LIVE is being billed as the world's first fashion show by an online fashion community.

Polyvore, an online community that promotes the “democracy of fashion,” is showcasing four alumni collections by graduates of the Fashion Institute of Technology. Instead of a flurry of fashion models strutting down the catwalk, the collections will be modeled by a select group of fashion bloggers, who will be announced one week prior to the show on polyvore.com.

3. Academy of Art MFA Fashion Show,  February 10, 2012 at The Lincoln Center.

AAU MFA fashion show

Models & Designers backstage at 2011 show.

On Feb. 10, San Francisco’s own Academy of Art showcases the collections of its best M.F.A. fashion design graduates. It is the only fashion school to show at NYFW, and, last year, three students took home Council of Fashion Designers of America scholarships. Make sure not to miss these talented up-and-coming designers: the Academy of Art Fashion Show livestream starts at 5 p.m. on Feb. 10.

4. BlacMéra by Yuliana Candra at Couture Fashion Week, February 17, 2012 at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. 

http://blacmera.com/

Designers displaying the highest level of American craftsmanship in apparel showcase at Couture Fashion Week, and we are absolutely thrilled that San Francisco based designer Yuliana Candra is showing her brand, BlacMéra. A sight to behold, Candra’s gowns impress with hand embroidery, beading and crystal work, while her silk tunics are hand-painted, layer by layer, with depictions of images Candra’s shot on her travels around the world. While this is the only event on our list that is not streamed live, couture fans can view images from the web that are sure to be uploaded by the fleet of smart phones in attendance.

Now you have something more to look forward to than the usual online blow out of models, celebs and socialites running from show to show in designer duds. Happy #NYFW, San Francisco!

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Sneak Peek: Can Shopilly End Daily Deal Email Inbox Madness?

A sneak peek at Shopilly, a promising new shopping tool from former eBay execs, left me doing what the welcome screen suggests: reserving my Shopilly ID…before it’s taken. While the allure of being the only “Lorraine” ID (no random numbers at the end! no weird underscores!) was, in and of itself, too good to pass up, I am looking forward to using soon-to-launch tool for other reasons. At the top of the list: if Shopilly works like it’s supposed to, it could mean I never have to look at another deal-related email again.

Of course, I could make that happen for myself next week, if I felt like unsubscribing from about 700,000 email lists. But here’s the thing: I like getting all those deal notifications, newsletters and emails. They save me money. I also write about them, tweet them, share them with readers. So for that, I like them. I just don’t like actually looking at them in my inbox. It’s the information, the discount codes, the dates of the in-store sales themselves that I want – not the actual communique getting them to me.

When it takes on its first members in the next month or so, the San Jose-based company will pull deals from the email accounts you give it access to, save them on Shopilly and even filter the emails from your inbox if you’d that to happen, Shopilly CEO Anirban Datta explained to me as he showed me screenshots of the forthcoming site. While the company wasn’t ready to release screenshots publicly just yet, I can tell you that it looks something like a cleaner, more streamlined version of Pinterest, with each deal or promotional email indicated by an image and saved in a nice scrollable grid format. It means being able to pull anything from the day’s Groupon deal to a sale at Bloomingdale’s into one place, get it out of your email and have access to it on a mobile device when you are shopping I.R.L.

In addition to just saving deals, Shopilly will also have a great many other bells and whistles, including the ability, should you choose to allow it, to alert stores of your presence via mobile device when you are shopping in person and offer you deals based on your purchasing history.

I thought it was an compelling enough idea on its own, but the team behind the project adds to the intrigue: the technical co-founder is eBay’s former chief engineer, Randy Shoup, and there are lots of other interesting folks involved, including people from places like Wharton, StumbleUpon and even a former prof of mine from Stanford.

The company is hoping to amass its beta tester pool from the people signing up to reserve IDs, so if getting in on something early and beta testing like only a shopping bandit can sounds like fun, it could be worth signing up.

For more news and updates about fashion and technology, keep your eyes on @InStyleandTech, a new project from SF Indie Fashion founder Lorraine Sanders. Online home coming soon…

Don’t Call it ‘Frisco: Meagan Reelitz’s Prize-Winning Ring

Diamonds Are in the Cracks Ring by Meagan Reelitz

Oakland jewelry designer Meagan Reelitz

Finding beauty in life’s rough spots never fails to impress. And so much the better if that beauty happens to involve diamonds and San Francisco. That’s just what you’ll find sparkling away in Oakland designer Meagan Reelitz‘s Diamonds Are in the Cracks ring, the grand prize winner in the Jewelry Artisan’s Collective 2011 Design Challenge. The most recent installment of the annual jewelry challenge asked designers to create work inspired by the San Francisco experience and the theme, “Don’t Call it ‘Frisco.”

Using earthquakes as her starting point (and that’s about as real-deal San Francisco as it gets), Reelitz created a piece with both style and historical substance.

“I took the seismographic report from the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake and altered it to fit nicely on a ring band of sterling silver. I then hand-sawed the report into the band. I set 5 diamonds within the cracks,” Reelitz says of her process.

Stay tuned for news of Reelitz’s upcoming exhibition at Maiden Lane’s Manika Jewelry.

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Shacking Up: Rare Device + Little Otsu = Cool, New Space

News from San Francisco’s only design store with a name torn from the pages of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan: Rare Device is leaving Market Street for a bigger and better space on Divisadero, where it will partner up with onetime Mission paper goods shop Little Otsu. The planned relocation is set to take place in early March.

Specializing in design-conscious gifts, home accessories, art objects, jewelry and wearables, the new collaborative shop will include a Little Otsu mini store stocked with a full line of publishing products, as well as selected crafts and goods. This is the first time Portland-based, Little Otsu will be available in San Francisco since the closure of their Valencia Street store over a year ago.

Rare Device is currently located on 1845 Market Street and promotes a variety of designers who create modern, handmade, and beautifully-designed goods. We can’t wait to see the new and improved space in the Western Addition neighborhood at 600 Divisidero Street (at Hayes).

Photography courtesy of Rare Device

FashFilmFest Gets Funded, Will Take Place in April

Good news came yesterday for the San Francisco Fashion Film Festival (a.k.a. FashFilmFest): the startup film festival effort from local style bloggers Adelle McElveen, Kim Mitchell Stokes and Annie Wilson exceeded its $6,000 funding goal via a Kickstarter campaign. What’s more, we hear the festival is slated to take place over two days in April (7&8).

With screenings planned for the Roxie Theatre in San Francisco, the inaugural festival featuring both new, documentary and classic works exploring the intersection of fashion and film is still accepting submissions. If you’d like to submit work, you can do so here.

More San Francisco fashion news

Photo: Marlene Dietrich in Der Blaue Engel (“The Blue Angel”)