Philly Fashion Week celebrates a style community 20 years in the making with this weekend’s slate of runway shows

The day before neo soul singer Marsha Ambrosius left for a five-night engagement on Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite Cruise, her stylist, Dame Collins, scurried through Maison Philly Fashion Week.

Collins — who also styles ’90s R&B girl groups Total and SWV — was searching for a dress for Ambrosius to pair with red, thigh-high patent leather boots.

While Collins frantically combed through Maison’s store, curator and stylist Keiko Myrtice rolled a rack of clothing into the boutique for Maison’s owners Kevin Parker and Kerry Scott to add to their collection of pieces from emerging designers.

Within minutes, Collins was showing Ambrosius a red and purple blazer that could double as a knee-length frock on FaceTime, a perfect compliment to her shiny crimson boots.

“This is always the first place I come when styling my clients,” said Collins minutes before he purchased the $120 blazer.

Maison Philly Fashion Week — a 5,800-square-foot boutique in the Fashion District – is more than a retail space for emerging local designers. Designers have access to industrial sewing machines to fashion their collections and a studio to make social media posts. At its core, Maison is a welcoming space for local designers, an extension of Philly Fashion Week, the biannual runway show Parker and Scott started in 2006.

Philly Fashion Week will celebrate its 20th incarnation this week with runways at W Philadelphia, Crane Arts, and the Fashion District. The festivities start Wednesday with a trend show and student design competition, and culminate Saturday evening with a runway show. Thirty-five emerging designers will debut collections including Project Runway alum Prajjé Oscar. Shortly after, the collections will be available for sale at Maison.

“It’s been a long, hard road,” said Parker. “But it’s been so rewarding to have had an impact on so many designers' lives. Our dream has come full circle.”

Scott and Parker produced their first Philly Fashion Week, a weekend of outdoor shows at City Hall’s plaza, back in 2006.

Back then, Philadelphia’s fashion community was centered around retail, with specialty stores like Ann Gitter’s Knit Wit and Joan Shepp’s eponymous Center City shop at the center of the elite local fashion scene. Rarely did these boutique owners sell pieces made my local designers.

In the late 1990s, HBO’s Sex and the City, Bravo’s Runway, and the pervasiveness of New York Fashion Week made everyday people curious about high fashion. By the early aughts, everyone wanted a piece of the glitz and glamour.

Parker and Scott started Philly Fashion Week because they wanted to make fashion more accessible to people like themselves — and it looked fun. They quickly realized design had to be their focus, not the party.

It wasn’t long before Parker and Scott’s Fashion Week was joined by other events. In 2007, the late stylist Anthony Henderson started 17 Days of Fashion. In 2009, the city started its own version of Fashion’s Night Out. That same year another group started the Philadelphia Fashion Week. The city’s fashion landscape was now very crowded.

“It was very competitive,” Scott said. “No one wanted to work together. There was no official fashion event. We did everything on our own.”

“The shows were all entertainment,” Parker chimed in. “We wanted to focus on the industry and help Philly designers feel like they didn’t have to look to New York or Los Angeles for validation. We are perfectly capable of telling our own fashion story.”

In 2010, the city of Philadelphia tried to unite the disparate groups under the Philadelphia Collection. The endeavor lasted five years.

Philly Fashion Week is the only group that remains.

Parker and Scott have hosted Philly Fashion Week at quintessentially Philly spots from the Kimmel Center to the former SugarHouse Casino. Designers with celebrity followings like ThesePinkLips, SheWorkz, and Baltimore-based Season 20 Runway winner Bishme Cromartie have all debuted their collections at Philly Fashion Week.

“We were young and ambitious,” said Parker, who is now 39. “The sky was the limit.”

When Parker and Scott launched Philly Fashion Week, even I was skeptical. Fashion had rules and these young men broke them all. But they were brave. Fashion, they said, wasn’t just for the elite.

For example, back then the industry standard was for designers to show collections six months in advance. That may have worked for specialty store buyers who needed to stock their stores, but it irritated everyday shoppers who were increasingly getting used to the immediate gratification of online shopping. Parker and Scott instituted a “See Now, Buy Now” model, a few years before New York Fashion Week started a similar program.

“We’ve incorporated Shop the Runway into our collections since 2010,” Parker said. “Designers can thrive this way because they get to customers on the spot.”

Models on Philly Fashion Week’s runways were of varying races and sizes, from tall and slim, to petite and curvy. Parker and Scott sponsored streetwear shows before athleisure became a thing and celebrated androgyny, supporting designers who put men in skirts on the runway.

Most importantly, Philly Fashion Week wasn’t just for select members of the press. Anyone could buy tickets to the runway shows, networking events, and educational seminars that, for the last 10 years, have included designer critiques from Fern Mallis, the fashion doyenne who is credited for bringing New York Fashion Week under the Bryant Park tents, creating a modern version of New York Fashion Week.

“Through deployment of strategic partnerships and unquantifiable hard work by Kevin Parker and Kerry Scott, Philly Fashion Week has become a magnificent nationally recognized platform,” wrote then-CFDA President Cassandra Diggs in a 2022 letter to Philadelphia’s City Council praising the duo’s commitment to making regional fashion weeks.

Over the years, Parker and Scott determined it would be hard to keep Philly Fashion Week going without a dedicated space for local emerging designers to sell their clothing.

Last April Parker and Scott opened Maison. The space is open all year and is busy every day with designers like Autumn Lin preparing her Heartless Revival collection for Thursday’s Philly Fashion Week’s Immersive Dreams Presentation. On a recent visit, Harold Halcomb, also known as Joseph the Dreamer, was adding stitching to his collection of upcycled jeans.

“We have so much support here,” Halcomb said. “It’s my fashion home.”

Philly Fashion Week’s 20th anniversary will be a yearlong celebration with pop-ups, fashion installations, an awards ceremony, and, of course, lots of bubbly.

“We’ve worked so hard for this,” Scott said. “Our time is now.”