FASHION WEEK WITH FUNCTION
By Bobby Riley | September 17th, 2009
Trovata Bus: Fashion Week
Today marks the last day of the 2009 NY fashion week, after seven days of inspiration for those of you who have been tuned in. Hoping to have attended this year after missing last year makes me feel … fine actually. ’Next Year’ has been my saving grace response supported by my sixteen month year old son Maddox.
Except it will be my second year missing personal invitations from longtime friend, visionary & prankster John Whitledge. Founder and owner of Trovata, a Newport Beach, California-based clothing company that specializes in casual contemporary wear and winner of the Vogue Fashion Award a few years back. Time flies, indeed. It seems like yesterday when John, his sister Katherine and I would be hanging in Harvard Square chatting about personal outlooks towards fashion/sport/style. John was a bit younger, but super smart, inquisitive and always picking my brain on retail, marketing, apparel and the concept of brand as he was gearing up to start Trovata in his college dorm room circa 1998.
Fast forwarding twelve years, the attendees of Trovota’s NY Fashion week show on Thursday were cautious when asked to enter into the back of an oversized white school bus painted on the side with “petrol–consider the alternative” before arriving into the expected NY Fashion Week scene. The Rauschenberg inspired art bus that John and the Trovata crew converted to run off vegetable oil was stylishly sustainable. Nice to have some form follow function at the show, I think. Interestingly enough the pioneering ‘Grease not Gas’ movement was pioneered by another longtime friend Mike Parziale, who you may be familiar with as founder and owner of Greasebus. I met both John and Mike (separately) back in 1996, while I was opening a culture converging shop called Concepts. John was a college student and inspired apparel visionary, while Mike was a Plymouth State, NH snowboarding mastermind from the Blue Lodge along with a host of other people-movers that went on to do very influential things.
At any rate, the inspiration for Trovata at the beginning was to surf/style/travel. Sincerely living out the brand tenants in new and considered ways John and team drove their vegetable charged bus cross-country to visit key retailers to show their line heading into NY Fashion Week this year. This paired with John’s idea of dipping runway model shoes in colorful wet paint before walking the runway was a surprising and indelible mark of distinction. An experience I would have liked to encounter in person this year.
The Trovata collection heading into 2010 is preppy with white and navy buffalo plaids. Blazer sleeves and pant hems are casually rolled, and nautical details like knots and gauzy scarves capped off the “ivy-leaguer’s lazy summer days on an island” theme say’s John in a recent interview. Check out the Trovata ready-to-wear collection previewed this past week at Fashion Week Daily.
If popular trend, esp. in styles of dress and ornament interests you, let me plug my highly discerning niece Erin Riley at Addicts Collective.
Form/Function/Fusion ’09!