For an audio slideshow, watch Fashion Garage: The Body Shop

By Michelle Castillo

Backstage, it was like any other fashion show: chaotic, models hastily pulling on skin-tight dresses while getting spritzed with hairspray. A blonde model stood motionless as a designer wound zippers and strips of fabric around and around her arms.

She then headed past the clothing racks to the runway, picking her way past the wrenches, past the drills, past the spare parts, treading cautiously to avoid the equipment that littered the floor of the auto repair shop. The model ducked so the top of her pompadour wouldn’t graze the red Porsche hoisted up on the lift up above.

Let the fashion elite and store buyers pack the tents at Bryant Park for the spring collections. Here, across the Queensborough Bridge and barely three and a half miles away, Long Island City hosted its own Fashion Week celebration on September 12.

“I think it’s very fun and cool,” said Tom Sohung, one of the designers featured in the show who described his collection as a “flight between ‘Xena’ and gladiators in a space ship.”
Complete with a high beaded collar that appeared to stretch the model’s neck, Sohung’s pleated, metallic silver floor-length gown did look out of his world. It reflected his collection’s strange futuristic aesthetic, and caught the dim light as the model sashayed down the runway.

“Especially with my pieces: I can see it fitting into the auto shop,” he added.

Of course, it would be hard to imagine anyone wearing a halter top plaid dress adorned with zippers trying to balance in three-inch heels while attempting to rotate tires.

Unlike the glamour of the tents in Manhattan, LIC Fashion Week was held in Evandro Tech Motors, a small auto repair shop that donated its space to the up-and-coming Queens designers. Folding plastic chairs lined the length of the runway, a cobblestone route that was a far cry from a fashion show’s traditional white runway. One model lost her shoe as she stumbled over the uneven path and hobbled a few steps before flinging off the other one.

That didn’t matter to the designers and models that had worked for months to put collections together for this event. And it didn’t matter to the 200 attendees, most of whom were patrons of the designers or family members cheering on their loved ones.

“This neighborhood has an incredible sense of community. We’re trying to help each other and make people realize how great this area is,” said Virginia Mason-Martinez, one of the event organizers.

The show was the idea of producer Sumie Tachibana and host Mason-Martinez, who co-owns Subdivision, a Long Island City clothing boutique, with her husband Lewis. Tired of seeing the designs year after year in Bryant Park, Tachibana and Mason-Martinez decided it was time that Long Island City designers showed their own collections to the masses.

“Queens has its own aesthetic,” Mason-Martinez said. “A lot of people don’t even go into the city anymore because everything is here that they need.”

Long Island City held its first fashion week last spring, when the collections for the Fall 2009 season were shown. This time, the event featured collections from five designers, as well as one piece each from five of Tachibana’s students, who take lessons from her in different aspects of apparel making. Empress Serna, a 14 year-old girl who is both a sewing student and intern for Tachinaba, showed a shirt and skirt look that she made especially for the show.

“It actually didn’t take me that long,” Serna said modestly. “It’s really simple.”

One group returning to the runway from last season was Feral Childe, a collaboration between Alice Wu, a trained sculptor, and Moriah Carlson, who studied painting. The two met while they were students at Wellesley College and have designed together for three years. Inspired by “The Sound of Music,” their collection used richly textured fabrics and hand-drawn textile prints to illustrate the Austrian landscape, a far cry from the 1960s style of buttoned up clothing inspired by the cable TV hit “Mad Men,” which dominated Manhattan runways.

“The clothes are kind of built instead of crafted in a traditional way, which is where we came up with the name Feral Childe, this sort of untraditional approach to sewing,” Carlson said.

A fan of the Feral Childe brand, Diane Eisenstat dragged her husband to Evandro Tech Motors despite the downpour. The Long Island City resident heard about the show from the owners of the shop that she often frequented.

“It wasn’t the sort of thing that you see all the time,” Eisenstat said, “It pushes your sensibility about fashion to a new place that is more interesting.”

Mason-Martinez agrees.

“People want to see what’s new and exciting,” Mason-Martinez said. “People are starting to say that Bryant Park is packaged. Here, you have people not so driven by profit. They’re more driven by imagination.”

Models strut their way down the makeshift runway. (Above)