Focus on fashion

Oct. 15—HIGH POINT — When the inaugural High Point Fashion Week gets underway later this week, overlapping with the fall High Point Market, the worlds of furniture and fashion won't just coincide.

They'll collide.

"Our tagline is 'Furniture and Fashion Colliding,' " explains Shay Johnson, co-founder of High Point Fashion Week. "When designers create a space, they create it like an outfit. We're dressing models in outfits the same way you would dress your home."

High Point Fashion Week will begin with a free mixer Friday evening and will continue through Oct. 26 with a variety of fashion shows held throughout the city. The events will include an adult masquerade fashion show, a children's fashion show, an emerging designer competition and a fashion boutique showcase.

So why have the week overlap with High Point Market, when tens of thousands of people descend on downtown High Point for what amounts to one of the most hectic weeks of the year?

Good question — and you're not the first one to ask it.

"Initially, there were a lot of people who didn't understand the premise of what we're trying to do," Johnson says. "Why were we trying to do something around the furniture market? But interior designers and showrooms have been supportive, because they understand what we're trying to do. Basically, we want to show how the two worlds cooperate together."

Johnson and her co-founder, Geovanni Hood, came up with the idea for High Point Fashion Week in 2020, but it was derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

"We had worked at the furniture market a couple of years in different showrooms," she says. "We saw that at the end of each day, there wasn't much for all those furniture people to do while they're here. We both have fashion production experience, so we had the idea of doing High Point Fashion Week."

According to Johnson, Hood began producing fashion shows in 2014, after getting his event planning certification.

"I was introduced to that world around 2017, and we partnered up with me hosting kids' shows," she says. "My background is more in fashion merchandising."

The two have spent the past six months or so lining up sponsors, securing sites for the various shows and recruiting models.

"Once we started promoting the event, we had two open casting calls," Johnson says. "We had over a hundred models audition, and we recruited 50 of them. Then we did a call for designers. Over 30 auditioned, and we picked 27 of them."

The majority of the models chosen are from the Triad, but some will be coming from as far away as Virginia and Tennessee.

"It's been a tedious process of planning over the past six months, but now we're ready to give the city something different to look at," Johnson says.

jtomlin@hpenews.com — 336-888-3579