On March 27, local creative collective Project Innovate Studios will debut a brand-new event: the 2022 Fashion Experience, a multifaceted exhibition and performance at Digital FX Studios on Perkins Road.
The event will center around a fashion show featuring brands GPU Terminal from New Orleans; Kyoko from London, England; CreatedFlo from Atlanta; +234 from Lagos, Nigeria; and Jae Dijon, also from New Orleans. These brands will be displayed on models from Baton Rouge and abroad.
Off the runway, the event will include musical performances from both Washington, D.C., and Baton Rouge artists, including members of rap collective Col-Der-Sac (who 225 featured last October). Also on the itinerary are poetry readings and previews of Njoku’s “Social Boot” documentary and other film projects from members of Project Innovate.
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“All of those things are going to be showcased in one ‘show,’ which is why we call it an experience,” says local creative and the event’s founder Zahir Muhammad. “An everflowing experience.”
With all those moving pieces, it’s been an all-hands-on-deck effort organizing the event. But on top of that there is yet another layer of complication: Muhammad says there was some debate among the committee over whether to host the event in Baton Rouge or New Orleans.
New Orleans has some clear advantages: more resources, more people (especially those in town for BUKU, which closes the day before), more visibility, more options for venues. In that light, it would seem like the obvious choice.
But: “New Orleans would overshadow the point,” Muhammad says. “Yes, the point is art, design, fashion. The point is also that it’s coming from Baton Rouge.”
It circles back the reason Muhammad embarked on the project in the first place. Though he can’t claim nativity, he has no question that Baton Rouge is his home. He’s proud to call it that, and he wants others—particularly other burgeoning creatives—to be proud of it as well.
Hosting the event in Baton Rouge, he says, affords him a major opportunity to advance his mission of elevating this city to the creative table at which it—and the artists who reside in it—are so often denied seats.
“What better way to show that,” he says, “than to intertwine Baton Rouge models and other cities’ models, to intertwine Baton Rouge music and other cities’ music, to intertwine Baton Rouge designers and other cities’ designers.”
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If all goes according to plan, he says, this event will shine a long-overdue spotlight on the creative renaissance that’s been taking root in Baton Rouge for some time now, allowing this budding creative capital to finally begin to flourish.
The Project Innovate Studios 2022 Fashion experience will be held on March 27 at Digital FX, Inc., 6010 Perkins Road, beginning at 5 p.m. There will also be a brunch on March 25 and a mixer on March 26. Find the lineup here.
Read more on Project Innovate Studios here.