This is the epicenter of the week, where leggy models don the frocks that the world will be wearing next year as a chichi, stiletto-wobbling crowd jostles for front-row seats alongside Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Other designers who show at Lincoln Center include Michael Kors and Diane von Furstenberg.
“Lincoln Center is where I knew I should be showing. It’s the best platform, and you’re going to reach the widest audience there,’’ says the soft-spoken and shy Fraser-Swan, who debuted her collection last year at the Spring/Summer 2012 show. “I guess I was a girl on a mission.’’
It was not a very long mission. Fraser-Swan, whose designs will show in one of the smaller Lincoln Center stages, reached this point after taking just a few classes at the School of Fashion Design in Boston. She left after only a semester.
“It was like, ‘I get it.’ I didn’t need to stick around any longer,’’ she says casually, shrugging her shoulders.
After that one semester, she started designing her collection, called Emerson (so named because she’s a descendant of Ralph Waldo Emerson), and since that time her clothes have appeared in fashion spreads and stories in Italian Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Women’s Wear Daily.
“It’s definitely unusual to progress so quickly,’’ says Christina Neault, executive producer of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week at Lincoln Center, where 90 of Fashion Week’s approximately 300 shows taking place this week are staged. “But there is absolutely a market for her clothes. When we screen applicants to show at Lincoln Center, saleability is a criteria for getting in.’’
Nearly 4,000 editors, writers, photographers, and bloggers from 34 countries are attending fashion shows at Lincoln Center this week. A fraction of that number will be in attendance tomorrow night to see Fraser-Swan’s new line, which was inspired by the 1940s and World War II and plays off of themes of masculinity and femininity, but that exposure will be enough to land her in blogs and international publications.
