Could the City of Dayton Become the Gem City for the Fashion Industry?

It’s been a busy couple of weeks here at Dayton Fashion Week and the dates have been set for the Kids Casting Call (10 a.m. to 1 p.m. March 10 at De’Lish Cafe located at 139 N. Main St.) and the casting call to become a host covering the DFW for Inside Couture Television (10a.m. to 1 p.m. April 7 at SunWatch Indian Village, 2301 West River Road) which airs in Miami Florida.

New York Fashion week kicked off this week and a Dayton native will be gracing the runway of Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in New York!  Tameka Jones-Young will rip the runway for Indonesian designer Farah Angsana. “Walking in Mercedes Benz Fashion Week has been a dream since I began my modeling career. I feel so fortunate to finally have the opportunity. I am beyond excited!” said the mother of 2 and graduate of Chaminade-Julienne. After taking part in a national search, Tameka is also the new face of Shinto Clinical – a new skincare line by fashion mogul and reality TV star Kimora Lee Simmons (ex-wife of music mogul Russell Simmons). You can watch Tameka live on the runway at FarahAngsana.com and on Style.com on Wednesday February 15 at 5pm. New York Fashion Week runs February 9-16 at Lincoln Center’s Darosch Park and features the Fall 2012 collections of some of the world’s top designers.

So what exactly is Fashion Week and why should the people of Dayton care that we are finally having one? In short, Fashion Week is an opportunity for designers to showcase their latest designs. We all know about the multi-million dollar showcases in New York, Milan, and Paris—they have the A List Celebrities sitting in the front rows of their shows and buyers from some of the top department stores and fashion lines in the world eagerly awaiting the next big fashion trends to hit the shelves and racks of their stores. But did you know that the City of Dayton has the potential to become prime real estate for the Fashion Industry. Yes, you read that right! The City of Dayton is sitting right in the middle of 2 of the most respected fashion brands in the country—Macy’s which is headquartered in Cincinnati and The Limited Brands which include Express and Victoria’s Secret (to name a few) is headquartered in Columbus. These companies spend millions of dollars every year to manufacture their clothing all over the world so why has the city of Dayton been overlooked as one of those locations to manufacture their clothing? As we all know when the auto industry collapsed a few years ago it left a huge gap in our local economy, unemployment skyrocketed, and it also left a lot of abandoned factories just sitting around waiting for someone to take notice of all of the gems around us. I’m not sure how much thought or energy has gone into trying to get the attention of Macy’s and the Limited Brands  from our city leaders or if they’ve ever considered the notion but it’s definitely something that Dayton Fashion Week team thought was worth mentioning–afterall it was Dayton’s close vicinity to Detroit, our railway system, and the easy accessibility to Interstate 75 and 70  that made us prime real estate for the auto industry.  Why not the fashion industry?