FASHION Magazine

Each year, the CFDA and Vogue partner up to help up-and-coming designers in the fashion industry with funding and mentorship opportunities. From hundreds of applicants, ten designers are selected and these promising candidates will go on to compete for three prizes. This year, the overall winner will walk away with $400,000 and the two runners-up […]

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Challenged to dress a local musician for the stage, the four remaining Off the Cuff competitors were back with new work on on August 2. Heather Rappard dressed her musician, a harpist, in a floor-length midnight blue gown–but was again warned by judges to step up her technical game.  Bree Mackin, paired with Mary Stewart, dressed the guitar-strummin’ songbird in a bubbly party dress trimmed in black lace that unfortunately won’t take her to the final round.

Last Sunday’s challenge in Halifax’s Off the Cuff, a fashion competition and runway show presented by Argyle Fine Art gallery, couldn’t have been any more inappropriate. The designers were assigned the task of making a garment that was inspired by Halifax’s tempestuous weather and that could be transformed in some way. And so, on one of the scarce sunrise-to-set sunny days in the ‘fax, five designers wrapped their already-sweltering models in practical, toasty outwear.

Down the open back of one dress, a waterfall of hard drive platters and spindles spill along the model’s spine. On another, vinyl records make up a dramatic, bell-shaped skirt. Anti-slip fabric folded into box pleats puffs out below a bodice of cassette tape on a third cocktail dress, and a fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh pull together even more shiny bits, from silver-sprayed Christmas tree light bulbs to strips of film and strings of CDs. These are the ingenious creations hatched from week one of Off the Cuff, a fashion competition and runway show that has taken its inspiration from Project Runway and found its home in Halifax’s Argyle Fine Art gallery (1869 Upper Water St., 902-425-9456).