With Main Street and Gastown bursting with boutiques brimming with B.C. design, Portobello West a monthly must, and blogs and Web sites landing news of the hotness within the city limits in your inbox every day, it’s easy to forget that local fashion only became a major force fairly recently. A biannual happening since 2004, Vancouver Fashion Week was a once-a-year thang when show producer Jamal Abdourahman first launched the event in 2001. “He wanted to create a forum for B.C. designers so we weren’t losing homegrown talent to the East,” says executive director Jaime Shulman, who has been involved for the past three years. In the 1990s, she says, New York and Toronto were North America’s only serious players. “At the turn of the millennium, there wasn’t any big event” locally, she says, yet “Vancouver has the most fashion-design schools per capita of anywhere in North America, and there was nowhere for these guys to go.”

The spring 2008 Vancouver Fashion Week (which means clothes for the coming fall and winter) runs now through Sunday (April 20) at Chapel Arts (304 Dunlevy Avenue). It also means a showcase for fresh, new talent. “We try to make it accessible,” Shulman says. “We want to make sure there’s a place for students. This season alone, we have fresh grads out of LaSalle [College] along with Anna Sui, who has already conquered the world.” While the U.S. designer herself will not be attending, she is sending a portion of the collection she showed in New York in March, which featured her signature eclectic cuts and an eye-rocking mix of prints, including one inspired by Northwest Coast aboriginal motifs.

Shulman describes Vancouver Fashion Week as a place “where local and international can come together. Fashion has become globalized. What I try to do is create a place for all different types of designers. It used to be that Vancouver was really behind the curve. Now we’re closing the gap. We can access Style.com and see what’s hitting the runways. It’s a cheat sheet.” True enough. A half-hour on-line and you’re clued in to trends everywhere, from SoHo to Harajuku. “The negative side,” Shulman says, “is that it’s difficult to define what Vancouver style, or any area, is. You pull from so many different places.”

Among the lines Vancouver Fashion Week audiences can preview are 3sixteen’s street wear, clothing by Vancouver designer David Leach, and—for both genders, and yet to enter the Canadian market—New Zealand line Huffer USA, which launched in the U.S. with looks the company calls “a mixed bag of original madness”.

Other labels this season range from biggies like Flo Sport to the sexy, confident collection of on-line fashion house Coquette Couture 1827. Papillon is sending its signature Asian-made boho looks. Toronto-based NaMoDA is represented by finely detailed, seductive clothing in natural fabrics like organic cotton and bamboo.

Not all who apply get in. According to Shulman, “What goes on the runway needs to be sale-ready. With students, we’re fairly strict. It has to be on trend and in season.” One newbie who made the cut is recent Kwantlen fashion grad Justina Anzulovich, who will present her LikeSunday men’s and women’s looks, which she defines as “street wear—not dressy, but you can wear it out. Exaggerated silhouettes, lots of geometric inserts and neon details.”

Showing a collection can be costly when you’re first starting out, so Vancouver Fashion Week has various categories that let emerging designers strut their stuff, reasonably priced for those on the lower rungs of the ladder and including everything from models, hair, and lighting to backstage equipment. Among those grabbing the opportunity is self-taught local designer (also an actor, a model, a standup comic, and a band member) Claire Carreras and her Twitch-In label. “I was surprised how inexpensive it was to have garments in the show,” she says. “The toughest [challenge] for emerging designers is to build that brand following.” Carreras, another designer who hangs out her shingle on the Internet (at www.twitch-in.com/ ), says “Tops are my favourite thing to create.” She also designs coordinated skirts cut “so they don’t flip up at the back. Something you can dance and run around in.” She interprets her hot looks in cotton-spandex, corduroy, jersey, Indian silks, and mostly sticks to “really bright, fun colours all year round”.

Shulman sums up the fall palette as “all over the map…we’re still moving towards that whole monochromatic trend that started last season, but it’s by no means boring, with all those different textures, shades, and layering.” And it’s a major switch from the bright colours we’re just getting into for spring and summer.

The Vancouver Fashion Week schedule is at www.vanfashionweek.com/.

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