Columbia Business School Returns With Annual Fashion Show — and Sustainable Focus
Columbia Business School returned with its annual fashion show Thursday at the Harlem School of the Arts, billing emerging talent and sustainable innovators alike.
Back in real life for the first time since the pandemic, the show had 150 registrants and was put on by the Retail and Luxury Goods Club. It featured a roster of up-and-coming designers from Harlem and beyond including womenswear labels Dawang, La Femme Apero, Femme Progressive and Onaya; accessory brands Pajara Pinta and Breezm; as well as sustainable clothing rental platforms Nuuly (which is owned by URBN) and ByRotation, and pre-owned purveyors LePrix and Infinite Goods.
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An advance preview of the night’s showing designers revealed a diverse group of New York fashion talent.
Dawang is a New York-based contemporary streetwear label from Chinese-born founder Daisy Wang with a modern take on traditional chinoiserie fabric. In another case, design houses such as Onaya focus on Indian wholesale and traditional wear (lehengas and the like) with an artisanal focus. The label has an ambitious goal to employ at least 10,000 skilled makers in India. Meanwhile, Italian label Prota Fiori (meaning to “protect flowers”) extends a careful — and sustainable — hand to the footwear craft, employing plant-based leather alternatives (in select heel insoles) sourced from apple and grape skins. The B Corp was established in 2019 and is carried at Neiman Marcus, among others.
Other newcomer accessory brands featured in the fashion show included sleek 3D printed glasses from Breezm (soon to open its first-ever New York flagship) and vacation-ready hats from Colombian lifestyle brand Pajara Pinta, many of which are made by self-employed artisan women, and are splashed with motifs of joyful and colorful birds, palm trees and flowers.
Established on the campus in 1998, the Retail and Luxury Goods Club has since grown to more than 400 members and 4,000-plus alumni, convening a number of fashion’s namesakes. Recent speakers for the club’s events included PVH’s chief executive officer Stefan Larsson and Rent the Runway’s president and chief operating officer, Anushka Salinas, among others.
With a long-standing relationship with the Luxury Education Foundation, the club’s pipeline of talent has seen placement at Bain & Co., Boston Consulting Group, Cartier, the Estée Lauder Cos., Kering, ThredUp and more. Oliver Chen, Cowen’s managing director and adjunct associate professor of Business at Columbia Business School, serves as the club’s adviser.
“We are hoping to promote our mission of sustainable fashion practices and supporting emerging designers in our community,” Beatriz Veríssimo, a Columbia Business School graduate student and Retail and Luxury Goods club member told WWD ahead of the event.
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