Katy's American Indian Arts

The thought behind it all.

Our Wisconsin Fashion Week 2009 concept was "Tribal" and all of us had some great ideas on how to pull this off without looking over the top and offensive. Brainstorming is a good thing. Once we had a starting point we were off and running.

(From left to right - Julie, Jess, Mandy and me are waiting to take our rolling racks and props to the dressing rooms.)

Tribal can mean a lot of things but we wanted to stay "Native American Tribal". How cool would that be! We were scheduled first on the runway for the main event Saturday night and we wanted to set the place on fire, not literally but figuratively.

Once we had a theme established we wanted to tie it all together with a Native American dancer and some killer props that the models would carry down the runway and then perform some type of "action" with each prop at the turn around. The "turn" is the models moment to be seen and we wanted to change that and put the prop and the action center stage. Literally! The model now needed to be an actress. We wanted to entertain and excite the crowd as well as pay tribute to the Native American influence in fashion right at the turn. We wanted to set a new standard for fashion shows - Surprise!

For the dancers we had Art Shegonee and his daughter Marel but for the props we went to Katy's American Indian Arts on Monroe Street and found an amazing assortment of arrows, spears, dream catchers, and drums that Katy was more then willing to let us use in our show. Without Katy the show would have been missing a very important element.

In addition to everything else, we now had to worry about the props as they were authentic and VERY EXPENSIVE. Yikes! I had no idea. Because they were so expensive nobody wanted to be responsible for theft or damage to the props so we made everyone responsible and we stuck to them like glue the entire night. Not once were they ever out of our site. Thank you Katy, we greatly appreciate the support.

As soon as I get the pictures of the models I'll post them for all to see.

Jennifer