With one week to go until showtime, Portland designer Elizabeth Dye hasn’t decided if she will be showing wedding dresses. In preparation for her Oct. 22 Portland Fashion Week collaborative fashion show, Dye has been editing her show and touching up finished pieces for the past six weeks.
As a ready-to-wear and custom designer, Dye designs for the best of both worlds, but her decision to include both is not yet decided.
“Haute couture is being made by fewer and fewer designers everyday,” Dye said.
Designing custom-made wedding dresses is Dye’s outlet for extravagant creativity.
She enjoys designing alternative wedding dresses because her customers feel free to indulge their fantasies they wouldn’t normally explore in other areas of their lives, Dye said. But whether a selection of these dresses will walk the runway is undecided as of now.
This should not worry the Elizabeth Dye tribe – she cuts it closer to showtime than most designers because she likes the intensity of pressure that short deadlines bring.
Portland Fashion Week, which runs Friday, Oct. 19 to Wednesday, Oct. 24 features 33 designers, 25 of whom are local.
Dye will show her designs on Monday’s collaborative show titled “The Collections” alongside designers A Broken Spoke, Dayna Pinkham, Emily Ryan, Holly Stalder and Kate Towers, among others.
“Putting together a show is all about discipline,” she said. The trick, Dye explained, is narrowing down ideas for a particular show.
“I will wake up in the middle of the night with an idea or inspiration that is appropriate for fall or spring or good for living on my inspiration board for three years,” she said.
So what will next Monday look like for Dye?
“My rule is I can’t sew on the day of the show,” she said. “It is like a wedding day. I have to make myself eat.”
Sustainable fashion in Portland has been a buzzword in town for several years. Some designers have taken sustainability and applied it to every aspect of their business, but not all Portland designers stick to a strict sustainable diet of minimally processed and dyed fabrics.
“I also consider sustainable fashion to be living and working in the community where you sell your clothes,” Dye said.
Because Dye sells clothes from her own shop on NW 23rd Avenue, she cuts the environmental degradation common in the fashion industry by eliminating transport cost while maintaining that local connection to the community.
Portland designers have the freedom to be flexible within the city’s young industry. What Portland lacks in century-old traditions of textiles and couture is made up for with the value the community places on local talent.
“Portland and Paris fashion week don’t have much in common,” she said, “but that is good thing.”
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