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Meet the Winners of the ELLE FASHION | NEXT Design Award
“I was just lying in bed in London watching this awful reality show, Made in Chelsea,” says Caroline Hougen, recalling the moment she found out that she had won the Elle Fashion next design award. “My brother called me to say, ‘You won!’ and I said, ‘No, I didn’t, this is an awful, awful joke,’ and he said, ‘No, seriously.’” For the 25-year-old, the realization that she was one of two recipients each awarded a $25,000 prize at ELLE’s fourth annual FASHION|NEXT show finally sank in when her brother texted her a picture of himself, receiving the prize in her stead, next to editor-in-chief Robbie Myers: “‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I believe you now.’”
The show, which took place September 6 at Lincoln Center—home of New York Fashion Week—was held in partnership with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). Hougen missed it because she was completing the last week of her summer internship at Topshop, obtaining the sort of real-world experience fledgling designers dream of. But her clothes, including a deceptively pretty floral maxidress and plaid overcoat inspired by Invasion of the Body Snatchers, more than did her justice before a panel of ELLE editors and fashion-industry judges that included Pamela Love, Coco Rocha, Creatures of the Wind’s Shane Gabier, and Timo Weiland and his codesigner, Alan Eckstein.
Expectations were high among the judges. “I hope that your future McQueens, Gaultiers, and Zac Posens are in this line of people,” said Rocha. (Posen has often shown his grandiose eveningwear collection on this very same promenade.) Consensus seemed to be that the panelists wanted a big statement — but one that wasn’t so big it could only come out after dark. They sought, in Love’s words, “an effortlessness that’s still sophisticated and edgy.” This tall order was also met by 22-year-old Savannah Cipriano, whose peach wool and perforated PVC dress and red vinyl skirt with cutout details earned her the Maybelline New York Design Visionary Award. “Her shapes are architectural, but there is a wearability and an accessibility,” said the company’s Vice President of Marketing, Carolyn Dawkins.
As the winners see it, their prize money will unlock many doors. “I was having a ton of panic attacks because I kept thinking New York was definitely the next step I need to take, but I couldn’t afford to move there,” says Hougen. As for Cipriano, “I’m hoping to open a studio-slash-storefront, and I almost signed a lease for a place in Chicago, but then it fell through,” she reports. “So this opens up a whole new world of possibilities.”
December 10, 2013admin
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