News
San Diego Reader
Fashion Coma
April 2004
By Jeannette De Wyze
Tanya McAnear’s mother collected costume parts: hats and wigs and funny glasses and clothing, all of which Tanya loved very much back in the mid-‘70’s, when she was seven or eight years old. She didn’t just play with these items. In the back yard of her Lemon Grove home, she staged shows for her friends and parents with music and dance numbers and as many wardrobe changes as she could think up. “I was coordinating fashion shows when I was a little girl,” McAnear says, bemused.
Today, at 36, McAnear is still putting on fashion shows, one of the handful of San Diego activity. Of the hundred of fashion shows staged in San Diego during an average year, she typically produces about 45 or 50. Her biggest event is the Golden Hanger fashion awards a gala presented each July by the local Fashion Careers College. Although the 25-year-old educational institution has a reputation for being homier than its rivals, the Golden Hanger show has grown into an extravaganza, attracting close to 1000 people, the majority of who pay $75 for admission.
“You’ll see everyone from drag queens to socialites to political people in the audience,” Jim Crawford predicted a month before last summer’s event. “It’s such a huge grab bag. That’s what makes it so interesting.” A onetime mode himself, Crawford for close to 30 years has made a business out of training models and, like McAnear, putting on events that employ them. For the last nine Golden Hangers shows, the two have worked together.
What the Golden Hanger showcases are collections designed by the college’s students. “Each designer creates four or five pieces that make a cohesive statement on the runway,” McAnear explained. But the overall assortment of collections tend to be anything but cohesive; everything from classic wedding dresses to the skimpiest club wear can show up among the students’ offerings, with party dresses for preschoolers, plus-size loungewear, men’s clothing, and more thrown into the mix. Each year McAnear and Crawford must choose the order in which all these garments will be paraded out on the runway at the college’s Morena Boulevard facility. Outside, Mission Bay glowed azure on the other side of the studying lineup, trying to match photos of the models Crawford would be supplying with the clothing each model would wear.
“Kids who come to this school are not here because somebody is telling them they have to go to school. They love fashion. They love the process. They love what they’re doing. They’re following their bliss.” Says Pat O’Conner FCC Founder.
