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Going Like Sixty
Brains And Creativity Behind New York Fashion Week is "Too Nice."
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Fern Mallis, the originator and creativity behind New York’s Mercedes Benz Fashion Week, couldn’t win a part on the fashionistas favorite TV shows: Project Runway and Ugly Betty. She’s “too nice” the producers declared. She took it as a compliment and went on about her life. For a Brooklyn girl who graduated from public high school it wasn’t hard.  Mallis, IMG's senior vice president of fashion saw it as more of a validation than a rejection. "In the conversations it just became obvious I just wasn't bitchy enough, which I thought was an okay thing," she says.
In her decades long career in fashion, Mallis has become one of its most tireless and visible champions. In 1993, as the executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, she organized the industry's first "Fashion Week" -- then called 7th on Sixth -- and took on the unenviable task of getting notoriously prickly designers to play nice and produce their runway shows in one central location. Today, she presides over Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in New York twice a year when the industry's biggest names pitch their tents in Bryant Park with her characteristic good-natured calm while making sure the hissy fits are kept to a minimum and Jessica, Demi, and Beyoncé get to their front row seats without too much hassle from the paparazzi. Mallis has also proven there's plenty of substance behind all that style. According to industry sources, the event generates over $235 million for the city each season. Perhaps that's why Mallis is logging plenty of frequent flyer miles traveling as far as India to help foreign fashionistas stage their own headline-grabbing shows.
For the Brooklyn-born girl who graduated from James Madison High School having won both the "fashion design" award and kudos from her classmates as "best dressed," it's a dream come true. "I still get goose bumps when the lights go down, the music starts and those first shows start," says Mallis. "It's thrilling."
(mediabistro)Via: mediabistro |
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