Eugene Weekly August 11, 2011

Fashioning Eugene
Local designers bring “wearable art” to the masses
by Rick Levin

Check this: If an alien, summoned to search the cosmos for che outré shoes, lands in your backyard and politely asks you to delineate the latest fashion trend in Eugene, you might tell him — after you stop laughing soda pop out your nose — that what defines Eugene’s sense of fashion is that it has no sense of fashion. You might explain to your new interstellar friend that half this city looks to be wearing its cleanest dirty shirt, and the other half is just another colonial outpost of Gap.

But hold up — local designers Laura Lee Laroux and Mitra Chester might put a snag in the shag of your high-heeled ideas about fashion. These two style mavens and all-around sartorial ambassadors of cultural cool — Laroux owns Redoux Parlour, and Chester, who along with her husband Aaron, operates Deluxe and Kitsch — these women want to prove that fashion isn’t just glossy magazines and bulimic skinbags prancing New York runways in Prada.

Fashion is art and, more importantly, it might be the only art you and me and all of us hold in common. “Your fashion is sometimes the first and only interaction you have with the world,” Chester says. “Everybody participates in fashion.”

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Eugene Weekly May 5, 2011

eugene fashion week

The Club Wear segment of Eugene Fashion Week packed Cowfish on April 29. From hip-hop inspired belted dresses and body and schoolboy suits to spandex, designers Juju Rootz, Gillian Smithline, Tilly Hamacheck, Harlequin, Marcia Lent-Knee and Alli Ditson almost all used upcycled, recycled and/or organic fabrics and materials for their out-on-the town looks. Avant-Garde night on April 30 at Oak Street Speakeasy featured the fashions of Lent-Knee, Kaitlin Coppins, Mitra Chester, Rachel Langford, Shalako Lee, Michelle Mandera, Marjorie Taylor, Rhiannon Dark, UO Costume Collective and Rebecca Fisher, who encouraged Eugeneans to “slip into something more questionable.” Almost every look incorporated leather, feathers and chains.