Project Glow on the Runway

A few weeks ago we pre­viewed the gar­ments and accessor­ies cre­ated for Pro­ject Glow, a fash­ion com­pet­i­tion for reflect­ive gear. Last Sat­urday even­ing we atten­ded the Wel­ling­ton show (the Auck­land show is on Sat­urday 26th, tick­ets here).

Right now it’s hard to com­pete with all those lus­cious bur­ger pho­tos here on The Wel­ling­tonista, so we think we need to lead this piece with the best­est mod­el in the whole darn show: Daisy (photo stolen from the Pro­ject Glow Face­book feed).

We’re sure you will agree that being vis­ible is import­ant for all mem­bers of your house­hold, and so it was great to see pieces on show for every­one.

Some of the chil­dren’s wear were among the most mem­or­able, with a very cute reflect­ive dino­saur hood­ie and a back­pack that con­ver­ted into reflect­ive but­ter­fly wings being two great pieces you could ima­gine being pop­u­lar among par­ents and the small people wear­ing them.

We were per­son­ally more keen on pieces that looked good dur­ing the day, but whose secret reflect­ive super-powers only became appar­ent at need (one of us uses a revers­ible jack­et, fluoro on the inside, for cycle com­mut­ing – a great example).

Our favour­ite piece embody­ing this was the embroidered up-cycled den­im jack­et with knit sleeves that we believe might have been a cat­egory win­ner. You’d wear it all day long, and then when you had to cross the road in the dark that even­ing, a driver would see you glow­ing in their head­lights at some dis­tance away, keep­ing you safe without com­prom­ising your style.

Oth­er pieces made reflectiv­ity a cent­ral fea­ture of their design. Some used large pan­els cut in inter­est­ing ways, like the cloud-shaped cape design entered in the com­pet­i­tion, and the com­mer­cially avail­able riff­ing-on-Mon­dri­an cyc­ling vests.

But there also were some well made and highly worked pieces that just glowed like the sun in the dark, which to us lost some of the oppor­tun­it­ies the mater­i­als presen­ted.

It became appar­ent that part of gen­er­at­ing a usable pat­terned design that works in bright lights was to space out the reflect­ive areas suf­fi­ciently so the glow did­n’t wash out the pat­tern the design­er was attempt­ing to cre­ate.

Thus one of our oth­er favour­ite pieces, a vest made up of tens of palm-sized dia­mond pieces arranged like plate mail (the ulti­mate in pro­tect­ive cloth­ing!) and joined togeth­er with met­al rings, spaced so when the light hit them they were all still seen indi­vidu­ally. For extra interest, only some of the dia­mond pieces were actu­ally reflect­ive, which was a nice touch. The design­er of this piece (Sheryl Wong) was sit­ting just behind us, so we got to share in a little of the excite­ment when she went up for her Best Access­ory prize!

We also approved of some simple designs which were effect­ive and could eas­ily be used by people of all sizes. We liked a simple sash that went from one shoulder to the oppos­ite hip; a bag with a cross; and a belt that had flowers of redu­cing sizes hung from it. There was also a bag cov­er that was simply an elast­ic­ated, reflect­ive net. This was prac­tic­al both for con­veni­ence – it would­n’t take up much space – and ease of use. The com­mer­cial pos­sib­il­it­ies of all these pieces were appar­ent.

There was anoth­er sec­tion for fab­ric swatches about 20cm by 30cm (The Fab­ric Innov­a­tion Award).  These mostly had reflect­ive yarns woven into them cre­at­ing a new dimen­sion to the pat­tern when they were lit up.  Oth­ers had small pieces of reflect­ive mater­i­al attached to the sur­face of the fab­ric. We used a phone torch to see the pat­terns before the show and some of the chequered pat­terns lit up very effect­ively.  It was a bit dif­fi­cult to see these on the cat­walk so for next year we would advise check­ing them out before­hand.

Unfor­tu­nately the show could have been bet­ter presen­ted. The com­pet­i­tion cat­egor­ies were not announced but just shown on the screens after­wards, which made it a bit con­fus­ing to fol­low what was going on. Although we were tak­ing notes it was all but impossible to catch the names of the design­ers and the cat­egor­ies they had won or been run­ners-up in (some of these are now lis­ted on the web­site, while oth­ers won’t be announced until after the Auck­land show). And it was not always obvi­ous when the pieces shown were in the com­pet­i­tion, and when what was being mod­elled was from one of the many (but admit­tedly quite cool) reflect­ive fash­ion spon­sors.

But in the end, the fash­ion shone!

All in all the show had some­thing for every­one and it would be nice to see more of the designs in pro­duc­tion for pur­chase.