Fashion Week Milwaukee

Wren Solares, event planner, has a vision: to bring more fashion events to Milwaukee. To bring this vision to pass, Wren decided to create her own show: a new event called Fashion Week Milwaukee, which held its inaugural event March 3 at Moct.

About 300 people made it to Solares’ first showing, targeted broadly at Milwaukee’s fashion/style-loving community. Rather than make it exclusively a runway event, Solares brought in vendors selling everything from vintage clothes and purses to the latest fashion items, along with models walking around the bar showcasing available outfits.

The result: a fun opportunity to get together, talk, laugh and look for treasures. Many of those treasures were gone quickly, thanks to a gift bag giveaway that brought a large number of visitors in early, normally an unheard-of occurrence for a Sunday event.

In the wake of the event’s success, Solares plans to reinstate a modified version of the event on a quarterly basis. The regular cycle would give boutiques, stylists and photographers a chance to get together, fashion lovers a chance to see what’s up-and-coming for the subsequent season and raise money for charity.

Long term, she also hopes to plan with Michael Damond, president and creative director of online periodical Fashionable Mags, a September fashion show branded with the Fashion Week Milwaukee label. In New York style, the show will be accompanied by a fashion crawl, where participants buy tickets to travel from boutique to boutique via bus, special events, and classes throughout the week in subject areas including sewing, makeup and styling. Better still, Solares plans on keeping the event affordable – filling a local void yet allowing anyone to take part.