On Friday March 12th I was fortunate enough to attend the Green is the New Black Fashion extravaganza and transformation fashion show at the Carbondale Rec Center in the Roaring Fork Valley. For the 8th year in a row, the Carbondale Arts and Humanities Council produces this event as a fundraiser for the Roaring Fork school district. Each year, the show is done with a different theme to send a powerful and motivational message to the audience. This year, the theme of the show was transformation.

I was elated to see that the small, delightful, and quant little town of Carbondale could give rise to such a fabulous production. The show featured 20 designers based in many different locations. From Carbondale itself, to Los Angeles to even Milan, Italy; the diversity of designers was vast. To separate the designers up a bit, this show did something I’ve never seen before. It featured dancing and mime segments before, during, and after the
models strutted down the runway. The performances all emphasized the transformation message/theme to the audience with powerful scenes from a butterfly growing its wings, to a mime performance about a young girl becoming a woman. At first I thought the dancing and other performances were provided as just a bonus, something the audience could enjoy and a way to segment the designers. But as the different performances went on throughout the fashion show, it was clear this “bonus” was in fact not a bonus at all and instead a way to accentuate the “transformation” theme of the show. It was also a beautiful way to intertwine fashion as an art and dancing as an art into one stunning masterpiece.

That my friends, is the beauty and uniqueness of the Colorado fashion scene.  Obviously cities across the world are all unique in their own way when it comes to fashion scenes. But here in Denver and even a small Colorado mountain town, fashion is always portrayed in such an artful and cultural way, with a great emphasizes on community.  Sometimes I think fashion can be stereotyped into something that is only runways and skinny models. But that is not the case, at least not here in Colorado and I am so happy to not only witness this but also be apart of such a powerful and growing community.