Little Black Dress Party a big success

We are so happy with how the first Little Black Dress Party went! It was small but mighty, with about 25 attendees raising $1132 for our charities, the Akanksha Foundation ($283) and Literacy Without Borders ($849) while mingling over delicious appetizers and martinis at Devlin's Cocktail Lounge.

photo courtesy of Marilyn Kontz

Everybody loved the accessory swap table and the silent auction. Thanks to everyone who donated their gently-used-but-rarely-worn treasures on the accessory table to find new homes, and huge thanks to our silent auction donors, Aminah Syed {Photographer}, Black & Bold, Caprice Consignment (on 99th Street), Devlin's, Jilly's Home and Lifestyle, Rebel Hips Belly Dance Studio, Edmonton-area Etsy vendors Everyday Diamonds and Stray Wires, and our twitter friends @recyclenazi and @GenoaK.

The incredibly talented Aminah Syed set up a photo booth which proved extremely popular - check her blog post at the link for more great photos.

Strike a pose. Photo courtesy of Marilyn Kontz

Gorgeous girls. Photo courtesy of Aminah Syed

Nicki wore a hair garden worthy of a tribal fusion bellydancer with her satin LBD.

Marilyn wore a Uniform Project LBD from Bright Young Things (which I had shrunk in the wash, much to my dismay) with a great straw cloche from Le Chateau. This is the dress from the slow fashion website that inspired this party, and you can really see it well in this shot where Marilyn is dancing with Premee:

Photo courtesy of Aminah Syed.

Christy, the mastermind behind the Garbaganza! recycled-materials costume project, found a studded purse on the swap table that matched her bolero jacket - which is embellished entirely with items that were originally headed for landfill. Her earrings were made from soda-can tabs.

#yegLBD organizers Deborah and Asia with garbaganza!'s Christy Boulter. Photo courtesy of Aminah Syed.

My own outfit is all from my Project 333 list: thrifted vintage mod-style shift dress, an amethyst-and-moonstone necklace that I made, and an organza-and-zipper floral headband handmade in Canada by Loralie and bought from local fashion mavens Black & Bold. You can't see them in the snap but I paired them with purple tights and my button booties. (I ran out of time to finish my sewing, but will wear my UP LBD sewn from the Classic pattern in bamboo viscose to the next one.)

(Yes, you read that right.)

We had so much fun that we're going to hold a second Little Black Dress Party! We're even going to let the boys join the fun this time.

#yegLBD2 will be held on Thursday, October 13th, 2011. Mark your calendars...

Slow Fashion: the Little Black Dress Party

I'm helping to plan the coolest little fundraiser ever: the Little Black Dress Party, on the evening of May 5th. We've been talking about it on our Facebook event page and on Twitter using the #yegLBD hashtag.

The Uniform Project expressed as a formula, via.

#yegLBD is a slow-fashion fundraiser inspired by the Uniform Project, wherein Sheena Matheiken wore the same little black dress, creatively styled with vintage or handmade accessories, for a whole year to raise money for the Akanksha Foundation (who educate underpriviledged kids in India). At year's end, a series of people followed in Sheena's footsteps for a month at a time to raise funds for other deserving charities. Here's Sheena's talk at TEDxDubai, to help you understand why we were so very excited by the Uniform Project:

Inspiring, right?

So, the idea of the party is that we all shop our closets and wear our LBD (or an equivalent basic) accessorized to express our personal styles, have a fabulous night out with our friends, and raise money for both Akanksha and a brand-new locally-based charity called Literacy Without Borders. LWB will partner volunteer teachers from developed and developing nations to set up literacy projects with lasting community-based support: 

How: By sharing its knowledge of effective approaches to literacy and harnessing the commitment of local volunteers, Literacy Without Borders helps communities adapt literacy models to their local customs. This way, each community will be more likely to create truly meaningful programs, better positioning their members to implement and direct the programs on their own. LWB Ambassadors are deployed as a pair to communities in development for a period of 18 months with the goal of bringing together the people within each community who are most passionate and able to develop sustainable literacy initiatives in their community.  Initially, these local volunteers will work closely with Literacy Without Borders’ Literary Ambassadors to adapt a literacy model that best suits the community, and eventually, they will run, direct, and teach the programs on their own.

 Our little party could truly make a huge difference for LWB, since they're at the stage where they're applying for charitable status, printing their first marketing materials, and embarking on their first pilot projects. We're so excited to be working with such an amazing charity during their formative moments.

Uniform Project's charity-of-choice the Akanksha Foundation, formed in 1990, educate underprivileged children in 58 centres and 6 schools in Mumbai and Pune and publish curricula for use by other educators, and cohosted the InspirED Conference on innovation in education in 2010. Photo via.

Mmmm, martinis. Via the Devlin's Facebook group.

We're also really excited to be having our party at Devlin's Cocktail Lounge, an upscale martini bar on Whyte Avenue. They're going to create a special drink and appetizer menu for the evening just for us, and the room's cozy-but-luxurious feeling will give our party the perfect atmosphere. It's going to be a fun night of socializing, with photography by the incredibly talented Aminah Syed (seriously, how lucky are we?); a silent auction of items generously donated by local, independently-owned shops; and an accessories-swap table.

Our giant tip jar is ready to go. Well, I might redo the Sharpie.

If you're in Edmonton, tickets for the Little Black Dress Party are now on sale at Eventbrite. The $30 ticket price includes a martini and an appetizer, and every penny that doesn't cover your food and drink - more than half of the ticket cost - will be donated to the Akanksha Foundation and Literacy Without Borders. It's a small room so be sure not to wait to get your ticket - we're sure to sell out.

If you're not in Edmonton, why not hold a Little Black Dress Party of your own?

Slow Fashion: Of Fashion Diets & LBDs

Slow Fashion can mean many things: a timeless or flexible cut that means you can wear it for longer; the use of high-quality and/or environmentally-sensitive fabrics, and socially- and environmentally-sensitive production techniques; buying vintage or swapping with friends; incorporating local crafting traditions into the design, or using local labour for the manufacture; making, embellishing, or mending your clothes yourself; or having your clothes custom-tailored (or knit or crocheted). Essentially it involves taking the principles of slow design and applying them to your closet.

Lots of people are blogging about their slow fashion resolutions, which have been dubbed 'fashion diets'. Kim at Preloved Reloved (via the Jorg & Olif blog) is going to buy only second-hand clothes for a year. Participants in Six Items Or Less are blogging about whittling down to, and living with, only 6 items of clothing for a month. Participants in The Great American Apparel Diet are not buying new clothes (but are allowed new accessories and gifted items) for a year; Australian blogger Kate from Fashion Fasting tackled the same challenge last year. Participants in Project 333 wear 33 items or less for a 3-month period. I'm sure there are many more individual bloggers I haven't discovered yet, since fashion diets and fasts have become popular enough that the idea has been covered by Trend Central and the New York Times. (Please, feel free to mention anyone I've missed in the comments!)

Source

Perhaps the best-known fashion fast involves something most women already have in their closet: the essential Little Black Dress first designed by Coco Chanel. In year 1 of the Uniform Project, Sheena Matheiken wore a single versatile LBD (well, 7 copies of it) every day for a whole year, styled to create hundreds of different looks using only items that were already in her closet, or donated items that were either vintage or handmade. She was inspired, in part, by how kids who wear school uniforms always manage to find an inventive way to make the look their own - and she used the project as an inventive fundraiser for the Akanksha Foundation, who educate children living in slums in the Indian cities of Pune and Mumbai and are co-organizers of the InspirED conference on innovation in education for India (I highly recommend that you check out Sheena's TEDxDubai talk - hugely inspiring stuff.). Now that Sheena's year in the LBD is done, the Uniform Project has moved on to one-month Pilots where people wear one outfit for a month to fundraise for a cause of their choice, with the new outfit design (mostly LBDs, but also a jumper and a two-piece suit, so far) being sold on the site. They also sell a new version (tweaked for fit) of the dress that Sheena wore (and a sewing pattern for it). That is also the dress that One Dress Protest's Kristy Powell is wearing (without accessories) this year; Kristy's year in an LBD also differs from Sheena's in that instead of posting daily fashion photos, she's blogging about her thoughts and peoples' reactions to the sociological and philosophical implications of the project. 

Meanwhile the designer of the original version of the Uniform Project dress (Eliza Starbuck) also is selling it as part of her capsule collection through her Bright Young Things website, and profiling buyers who are doing one-month Wear-a-thons. 

You don't have to go on a full-on fashion fast to take a slow fashion approach to your wardrobe, though. Start simply, by going through your closet, keeping the stuff that fits well and makes you feel great, donating what you never ever wear, and thinking differently about what you buy. (Recent stories in UK newspaper the Daily Mail suggest that the average woman has 22 things in her wardrobe that she never wears, 12 of which don't fit. Wow.). I think the advice for creating a timeless capsule wardrobe in these two posts is a fantastic place to start (boys, try this link instead). 

Inspired by what Sheena of the Uniform Project has done, a friend (hi Asia!) and I planning a ladies-only fundraiser tweetup where everyone shops their closet, and wears a basic black outfit, accessorized creatively to showcase their personalities. We thought a cocktail party like this could be an amazingly cool way to simultaneously fundraise for Uniform Project's charity of choice and a local charity  (Like, cool enough to inspire copycat events in other cities.). We're calling it the Little Black Dress Party (or, #yegLBD using the hashtag convention of #cityEVENT); likely in April, with the date to be announced once we nail down the venue. I'll do another post with all the details then.

I'm also following my own advice and cleaning out my closet, and plotting which fashion diet to join. The prospect of using a big purge and one-month-or-more challenge to help define my personal style and explore my relationship to fashion and consumerism is really exciting!