Fashion Capital - Day three in New York City...

Day three in New York City...

The time seems to pass by so quickly here, you never seem to have enough time to see and do everything and New York life is certainly fast-paced to say the least. A typical New Yorker's working day is an average of 12 hours.

Our first meeting was held in the lobby of our hotel at 9.30am where we were briefed for the day ahead, which we were all very excited about. Fashion-Enter designers had the opportunity to visit three boutiques and speak to the head designer about how they have established themselves.

Then we went down 38^th and 40^th street off Broadway which was packed full of fabric shops and gave the designers some great inspiration...

The first meeting of the day was with an artist called Laurence Rassin. Fashion-Enter designers spent 1 ½ hours with him at his loft studio on 514 25^th street between 10^th and 11^th Avenue.

Laurence uses a unique technique in which he brings his garments to life by producing a painting and then using that art work to create beautiful fabrics. He paints with his bare hands and then uses a special software package called Optitex which transforms the artwork into digital prints.

This software package has been developed with the designer in mind, so to cut out the pattern cutter so to speak. Optitex specialises in the development of innovation, easy-to-operate 2D and 3D CAD/CAM fashion design software. The designers enjoyed this meeting and will be considering the software package. http://www.optitex.com/

After lunch we headed off to our next appointment which was scheduled for 4pm. Fashion-Enter designers were introduced to a guy called Han who owned his own events company called Metro Funk. Metro Funk has been established for five years.

http://www.metrofunk.com/ enables designers to set up a trend setter account and invite people onto your network thus building up an extensive fashion network. Hans encouraged all Fashion-Enter designers to set-up a profile and to attend any events in the near future.

Our last meeting of the day was with a fantastic guy called Euclide Avridor. He is the head designer for Calvin Klein who kindly came over to out hotel to look at Fashion-Enter designer's garments and gave us an in-depth talk on how he began and gave some fantastic advice to our designers, he spent two hours with us and we were very grateful for all that that he gave us.

Derek Levy, Jenny Holloway, Euclide Avridor

Welcoming Fashion Capital designers to NYC is both exciting and a privilege. Nolcha is delighted to be the channel for international designers entering one of the world's fashion meccas. Preparing meetings with industry figures has been key to the sucess and learning process of this trip.