Valerie Joseph: Party with a purpose

Kristina Lum wears a romantic off-the-shoulder creation from Kristen Domingcil’s “Watercolor Tea Party” collection.

A local fashion designer guides hard-working interns in putting on a benefit fashion show

By Nadine Kam
Honolulu Star-Advertiser
Style Editor

The world of fashion is fun, beautiful, glamorous, sexy.

Not always.

Sure it can be, but that’s just the surface. The rest, like the notion of an all-powerful Oz in “The Wizard of Oz,” is just an illusion.

Behind the curtain you’ll find a lot of hard work, sweat, stress and heavy lifting. That’s the part Valerie Ragaza-Miao, owner of the Valerie Joseph boutique, wanted to show starry-eyed interns when she started her PINC (Partners Inspiring Nouvelle Concepts) program.

Valerie Ragaza-Miao wears a caterpillar-inspired creation by Rachel Pavlis, that will open the designer’s “Metamorphosis” collection, to be shown Aug. 29 at Rumours nightclub. PINC PREMIERE PARTY With Fresh Fashion Show preview: » Place: Paparazzi, Ward Centre » When: 9 p.m. to midnight Saturday » Admission: Free before 11 p.m., reserve at www.ValerieJoseph.com; donate school supplies for Community Helping Schools for a chance to win a grand prize » Call: 942-5258 FRESH FASHION EVENT Third annual benefit for Community Helping Schools with fashions by Valerie Joseph, Rachel Pavlis, Jennifer Fukino and Kristen Domingcil: » Place: Rumours, Ala Moana Hotel » When: 4 to 8 p.m. Aug. 29 » Tickets: $20, includes pupu buffet, available at Valerie Joseph, Ala Moana Center, or http://www.valeriejoseph.com » Call: 942-5258

Even though I should know better, when I meet up with Ragaza-Miao to talk about her PINC launch party Saturday at Paparazzi, I mentioned, “You don’t look stressed at all.”

“Well, it always looks very pretty. That’s what we work at behind the scenes so the audience can have a seamless experience,” she said. “Students enter an internship thinking, ‘Oh, it’s really cool. I can work with Valerie.’ But what they learn is it’s a lot of work that’s not very pretty.”

The PINC team was formed to assist her in producing a benefit fashion show. The students were selected in spring and started working on the project in May. Along the way, one dropped out, leaving only two to carry on, putting in 200 hours toward earning four credits at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

What it amounts to is a boot camp for budding community-minded entrepreneurs, event coordinators, fundraisers and public relations professionals in the guise of a fashion internship. All the skills are necessary components of making a business work today.

During weekly meetings, Ragaza-Miao invites professionals, such as Joni Redick-Yundt, author of “Million-Dollar Attitude,” to speak to the students about their paths toward success. The students are also coached in public speaking and writing press releases.

“What they’ve realized are the skills that are needed to produce a charitable event,” Ragaza-Miao said. “They’ve never solicited for donations before. They’ve never done cold calling. Everything is new to them. It’s pushed them to develop skills they never had before.”

In classrooms, students deal with theoretical concepts, not the realities of who’s going to provide labor, contribute gifts and prizes or fund their fantasies.

“In the beginning they had all these ideas, so I would have to step in and ask, ‘Who’s going to pay for all this?’ The reality of working for a nonprofit is there is no money,” Ragaza-Miao said. “They also wanted to charge $500 for a ticket. Now it’s $20. They had to learn to be realistic and pay attention to what’s going on in the community, in the economy.”

After researching various charities, the students elected to donate funds raised from the Fresh Fashion Event on Aug. 29 to Community Helping Schools. Tickets are on sale at the Valerie Joseph boutique.

During the PINC Premiere Party on Saturday, leading up to the Fresh Fashion Show benefit, there will be free Nail Candy embellishments by Salon Cookie Couture and body art by Dr. Wiz, raffles and free PINC gifts while supplies last. Attendees are invited to bring in school supplies for Community Helping Schools for a shot at a grand prize.

Then, if all goes well on the 29th, the organization founded by Kathie Wells will get a cash infusion toward its aim of matching community donors with classroom needs, such as computers, file cabinets and other necessities. And the audiences will be treated to an eyeful of fabulousness via a fashion show of Valerie Joseph designs, as well as the work of three young designers: Rachel Pavlis, Jennifer Fukino and Kristen Domingcil. Also showcased will be the work of Nolan Robert, celebrity makeup artist and Lifetime’s “Blush” reality makeup show winner, who hails from Hawaii.

PAVLIS’ interest in fashion developed when she started working in the Valerie Joseph boutique during high school. Prior to that the ‘Iolani School graduate envisioned a career in nursing.

Her “Metamorphosis” show will be an autobiographical depiction of her journey and coming out as a designer. “I was always interested in fashion, and working in the store steered me in that direction,” she said.

Now attending school in Portland, Ore., she still comes home summers to work at the boutique. Heading into her senior year at Oregon State University, Pavlis said she finally feels ready to work on a complete collection, and since coming home has been hard at work creating pieces seven pieces for the Fresh Fashion Show.

Rachel Pavlis

Exposure to Pacific Northwest style has provided some influence in terms of eco-thinking and winterwear.

“I found out I love winterwear and layering, and it’s something I want to do more of. Here it was like, ‘Why do I need a coat?’ I’m also more attune to seasonal trends, while in Hawaii everyone dresses the same all year.”

She’ll be showing a range of separates, dresses, coat and gowns made with rich silk chiffons, silk charmeuse, couture beaded lace, Italian wool boucle and metallic brocade.

Courtesy Jennifee Fukino
Sketches from designer Jennifer Fukino’s “Noctiluca” collection, to be presented Aug. 29 as part of the Fresh Fashion Event at Rumours nightclub.

Also in the show is Kristen Domingcil, who will be a senior at UH-Manoa this fall. She’ll be showing her “Watercolor Tea Party” collection of feminine printed, ruffled tea dresses, plus hats and her handcrafted accessories.

Compared with her contemporaries, Domingcil considers herself a romantic whose design sensibilities veer toward ruffles and old-fashioned femininity.

“I consider myself offbeat. My idea of fun is drinking tea and reading,” she said.

The ideas for her collection came to her while en route back home from studying abroad in London, where a class in architecture increased her comfort level in
working with space and proportion. She also found         Kristen Domingcil inspiration in the streets, where both young and old

displayed their sense of style.

“I always felt so underdressed there,” Domingcil said. “The American mentality is to wear whatever’s comfortable. For the British it seems to be wear whatever you want, but make it interesting. There’s always something off about what they wear, but in a good way. Like, I was on the Tube (subway) and there was an older woman dressed head to toe in different shades of red.

“It seemed like every time I saw someone, I would be thinking, ‘Wow, where did she get that piece?'”

The only overlap, she said, was in the abundance of leggings and skinny jeans. “But even the jeans were interesting. There was always some detail to them, or they were paired with a nice belt.”

In spite of all the extra work involved in staging a charitable event, Ragaza-Miao has plans to introduce a similar internship program at the high school level someday.

“It’s an important fork in life, when kids have to start thinking about their next steps. I see how people spend so much time and money in college and end up working in completely different fields because they didn’t find their passion or heart. I think if you truly do what you love, you won’t fail.”

She said she was lucky enough to know at a young age that she wanted to work in fashion. In grade school she’d stay up late — not doing homework, but sewing new outfits for classes the next day.

“I couldn’t wear anything from a store or anything anyone else would have,” she said. “A lot of young people are afraid to be unique, but I always felt a need to be different.”

Her immediate goal is to present two Fresh fundraising fashion events a year, although she said her husband, Joseph, worries that she’s working too hard.

“Maybe it’s because I don’t have children,” she said. “I believe you can parent in any capacity.”

Backstage Boss: Lynne O’Neill

Photo courtesy Devin Delano

Lynne O’Neill directs a rehearsal prior to the Duckie Brown menswear show last September. Another photo of O’Neill appears on the New York Times Web site of backstage scenes.

Local girl Lynne O’Neill follows her heart to a job directing shows for New York’s Fashion Week

By Nadine Kam
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
Features/Style Editor

New York Fashion Week starts today, and there will be a petite figure — perhaps in rubber slippers — calling the shots from the control booth at one end of the tents as the eyes and ears linking the front of the house with those awaiting their cues backstage.

It’s a demanding job to ensure the shows go on smoothly, but for Lynne O’Neill, whose production company is called Hula Inc., ain’t no big deal. It’s something the former Honolulu resident has been doing for 20 years, since the inception of New York Fashion Week.

O’Neill, whose family still resides in Hawaii, visits every chance she gets, and was here over the Thanksgiving through New Year holidays, a stay interrupted midway when she was called back to help with wardrobe on the TV series “Gossip Girl.” After spending a week on set, she came straight back to finish her vacation, a working trip anyway as she continued to work with designers via phone and e-mail to set up production meetings for the fall/winter shows.

O’Neill’s connection to fashion dates to childhood, when her dress style differed dramatically from that of her peers, thanks in part to her mom Florence Hanzawa’s influence. “She always had me in outfits,” O’Neill said, recalling vividly a Shirley Temple phase.

“I always liked fashion. I’d look at magazines and always thought I would have a store,” she said. “I didn’t dress like anyone else. For my prom, I wore a Pucci-esque long dress and little gold slippers. I don’t think I wanted to be different. I just wore things I liked.”

Today, she prefers edgy minimalism, perhaps mixing Commes de Garcons with rubber slippers that enable her to move quickly about the tents during fashion week.

Giving fashion a rest, she grew up to study art history.

“People always asked me, ‘What are you going to do with an art history major?’ but I always did what I wanted to do. I just follow my passion.”

Her passion led, serendipitously, to Macy’s San Francisco, where her art background came in handy producing fashion shows and special events “that were all about visual merchandising,” she said.

“At the time, I didn’t even know that jobs as a fashion coordinator existed. This was the early ’80s, but I was lucky to have had the chance to work with some great designers over many seasons, like Tommy Hilfiger, Willi Smith, Geoffrey Beene, Perry Ellis and Betsey Johnson.”

LYNNE O’NEILL’S FASHION WEEK SCHEDULE » Today: BCBG Max Azria, Duckie Brown (men’s), Ports 1961, Mik  Cire by Eric Kim (men’s)» Saturday: Twinkle by Wenlan » Sunday: Luca Luca, Herve Leger, Commonwealth Utilities (men’s) » Monday: General Idea (men’s), Perry Ellis (men’s) » Tuesday: Max Azria » Wednesday:Douglas Hannant

It is quite a different world today, with little girls as young as 6 and 7 aspiring to be fashion stylists. Coincidentally, O’Neill will be featured in Scholastic Books Career Book series on “Real Jobs: 21 Books for the 21st Century,” scheduled for release in a year-and-a-half. The books are designed for high school students, presenting career options ranging from an ER technician to fashion event producer. The book featuring O’Neill aims to take students “behind the scenes of a fashion event to discover who the key players are and how they all work together to pull off such an event.”

O’NEILL PUT her career on hold by the end of the ’80s, when she married and dreamed she could be happy as a housewife in Tokyo.

“I thought I was over it, but people still called me to do fashion shows.”

Life as a housewife didn’t go as planned, so she headed to New York in 1990, just as New York Fashion Week was being launched. Fashion shows before then were being presented in varied locations around the city, many crumbling and unsafe. Fern Mallis, then executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, had the idea of bringing all the designers together under one roof for their press and retailer presentations. After first setting up in hotels, the shows found a home at Bryant Park in 1994.

The scope of the shows never fazed O’Neill.

“It was all so new, we didn’t know any better, but it really challenged me and made me better,” said O’Neill, who credits her organizational skill and Zen attitude with her success. Out of 80 or so official shows during fashion week, she’s produced up to 19 a season. This year, she’s producing 12 shows, nine of them in the tents, four of them today.

“I’m very organized and can see the big picture. There can be 200 people backstage, but when everything is crazy is when I get calmer. I think my job is to be calm and keep everything under control so the designers can feel comfortable.”

THIS SEASON will be the shows’ last at Bryant Park. Come fall, the show will move up a few blocks to Lincoln Center, a move that has caused worry due to new logistics involved in moving garments from the fashion center to the site.

Again, O’Neill is the picture of calm. “I’m excited about the change. It’s a little farther away, but IMG (producers of fashion week) is very organized so I’m confidant. They make it all turn-key.”

There is also a notion that in the Internet age, with designers able to take their shows to the public and retail buyers without a media spectacle, that the shows may one day be outmoded.

“I don’t think anything will take the place of a fashion show because it is theater, a chance for a designer to present his vision. There’s nothing that can take the place of seeing how pieces actually move, the shape of things,” O’Neill said. And certainly nothing that can take the place of the magic spell cast over a room for those 15 to 20 minutes of show time.

“When the lights go out and the music starts, and the first models come out, It’s a really exciting moment,” O’Neill said. “I feel so lucky that I’ve been able to do what I do just by following my heart.”

Fluid fashion by Harari and Ryan Roberts

Anna Dequintanaroo wears Harari’s LunaBlossoms Mandarin jacket and Antonia pant in black, while Darah Dung wears Harari’s black knit T with Reed skirt in Moda Flora black.

Hui Makaala will stage its 39th annual scholarship luncheon and fashion show Sunday at the Sheraton Waikiki Hotel, featuring the Far East-inspired designs of Harari, men’s and women’s attire kamaaina retailer Tapestries by Hauoli, and Los Angeles-based designer Ryan Roberts.

 

Hui Makaala fashion show Featuring designs from Harari, Ryan Roberts and Tapestries by Hauoli » On stage: 1 p.m. Sunday, with 9 a.m. boutique sales and noon lunch » Place: Sheraton Waikiki Hotel Hawaii Ballroom » Tickets: $60 » Reservations: E-mailpresident@huimakaala.org

Roberts’ designs may be new to Hawaii fashion watchers, but he’s no stranger to our shores. He might be considered an honorary kamaaina because he’s traveled here frequently over 16 years with his partner, who hails from Kailua.

He’ll be showing a mix of men’s and women’s designs from his Spring 2008 collection and a sneak preview of his 2009 collection, the latter “inspired by Hawaii a little bit,” he said in a phone interview from his LA studio.

The collection embodies “the idea of getting away and the sense of relaxing,” he said. “The color story is a mixture of seafoam blues, whites, pinks and sand colors.”

Anna Dequintanaroo wears Ryan Roberts’ Spring 2008 wrap-apron dress in celery, $425.

Roberts grew up in Toronto, with an interest in illustration and fashion design. He moved to the United States in 1997, working for a series of East Coast designers before branching out on his own in 2000 with a men’s and women’s wear collection that reflects his background as a menswear designer, though, over the years, the women’s line has become his focus.

“I’m taking all the elements of tailoring, all the elements of menswear and applying it to womenswear,” he said.

The result is impeccable, detailed construction that also contains fluidity and looseness that he attributes to being out West.

“I always had an affinity to the West Coast, the pace, the people, because I grew up in a big city — not that LA isn’t a big city —

but everything is sprawling and open. Space is really important to me.

“There’s a nice, relaxed element to being on the West Coast. I find my designs are becoming less constructed, and (have) more ease, the longer I’ve been here.”

Which suits Hawaii just fine, as well as his vision of his clientele.

“They’re people who live busy lives, so getting dressed should be something effortless, and I try to design in a way that’s easy to approach.”

Funds raised by the fashion show will benefit Hui Makaala’s scholarship fund. This year, the Okinawan organization presented $20,000 in scholarships to nine Hawaii college-bound students.