What Fashion's Power Players Look for in Young Talent

Pratt Institute, located in Brooklyn, New York, is one of the most prestigious art colleges in the world, and it has been especially kind to fashion. Having launched the first fashion program in the United States, Pratt is to thank for the myriad fashion schools and programs that have sprung up since. So it's no surprise that the school's industry connections run deep, a fact that was made very clear at their annual fashion design jury review panel this past week.

Spotlighting select students' senior thesis collections, the event welcomed major industry players like the critic Lynn Yaeger, designer Adam Selman, editor in chief of Interview Keith Pollock, and about 15 others (this editor included) to weigh in on the students' final work. Any fashion publication worth their salt—from Vogue to W to Harper's Bazaar—had a member from their team on hand, making it an incredible opportunity for the young talent to receive feedback from the crème de la crème of fashion while also making vital connections.

Thrust into this mix, I made it my duty to find out exactly what it is these head honchos are looking for in up-and-coming designers. Unsurprisingly, the judgments were fairly subjective and thus diverse—it's nearly impossible to shake personal preferences in a situation like this. I couldn't help but gravitate to those collections that were more minimalistic, and more important, wearable, but I also appreciated the funkier, avant-garde offerings. However, if you compared my notes to, say, Yaeger's, the differences would likely be stark, and that's a good thing—fashion, after all, is created with different outcomes in mind. Some designers honor what's commercial while others privilege artfulness over everything.

Nevertheless, we were given certain universal parameters for our review, which I've outlined in a printable checklist below. We all agreed that the best collections checked off most, if not all, of these boxes, so consider it your one-stop-shop for perfecting your own designs, or simply sniffing out top quality designers-on-the-rise.

Scroll down to see what fashion's power players look for in young talent…

On the Runway: Prince’s Fluid Style, Rooted in Heels

Photo Prince performing at Wembley Arena in London in 1986. Credit Michael Putland/Getty Images

Last February, during New York Fashion Week, the audience at the Hood by Air show had a "moment," one of those rare shocks that jolt you out of your catwalk stupor and stick with you long after the lights have dimmed. It came courtesy of a model named Hirakish, who careened down the runway in a patent-leather suit and spiky high-heeled bootees, and who proceeded to go off-piste and to spend the rest of the show running in and out of the stands, interrupting other models' struts and otherwise joyfully, and challengingly, sticking his stiletto-shod feet in our faces.

Photo The musician at the Grammy Awards in New York in 1988. Credit Ron Galella/WireImage

I thought of this on Thursday when the news came that Prince Rogers Nelson, the diminutive musician with the oversize talent, had died. Unlike David Bowie, another musical icon who recently passed away, Prince was not often name-checked by designers as a collection reference.

Though fashion played a big part in his image, as the many slide shows currently making their way around cyberspace attest, and tho ugh he made a surprise guest appearance in 2007 at Matthew Williamson's 10th anniversary show, serenading the attendees and grinding with dancers and models (as one of the attendees, I can tell you, that was another "moment"), he wasn't a go-to aesthetic inspiration.

Slide Show Prince Took Heels to New Heights

CreditJeff Kravitz/AMA2015, via FilmMagic

Prince refused to adhere to genres in clothing, just as he refused to adhere to genres in music, which meant he tended to ooze into the designer imagination instead of immediately leaping to mind. But in the way he assumed the tropes of kitsch femininity — lace, ruffles sequins, peekaboo and high heels — and transformed them into the vehicles of an in-your-face masculine sex appeal, Prince had enormous influence.

Most of which can be summed up by the shoe.

The high heel was the through-line of his wardrobe for the four decades he was in the public eye; the consistent base upon which he layered all sorts of style and character changes. Prince wore heels when he barely wore anything at all (just bikini bottoms and a trench coat); he wore them in "Purple Rain" and with baroque brocade; he paired them with pastel suits, laser-cut, bottom-baring jumpsuits; he wore them with white hippie tunics at Coachella and slinky metallic gold at the Grammys; he wore them offstage, out to dinner in Sweden in 2013, and, according to Mike Tyson's memoir, "Undisputed Truth," to play basketball.

Photo Prince at the People's Choice Awards in Pasadena, Calif., in 2005 Credit Kevin Winter/Getty Images

He wore them so much that there were rumors he needed hip surgery as a result. And he wore them, he said, not because he wanted to be taller, but because "women like 'em."

He wore them as they were originally designed to be worn, as demonstrated in "Standing Tall," an exhibition last year at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto about men in high heels: as an expression of power and privilege reserved for male royalty, and only later co-opted by women in the 17th and 18th centuries. It made some sense. His name, after all, was Prince.

Slide Show Prince's Style, Through the Years

CreditDeborah Feingold/Corbis

And in doing so — in wearing them so regularly, unapologetically (he did not hide behind the acceptably masculine heels of cowboy boots) and effectively — he transformed the idea of men in heels to possibility from joke. On women, heels suggest sex; Prince showed they could function the same way for men.

It is a meaningful part of the equation that has added up to the current trend toward gender fluidity in fashion. Which, let's face it, really means men in women's wear, since women have been borrowing from men's wear for decades.

Put another way: There was Prince, and then there was Hedi Slimane's fall 2015 men's wear show for Saint Laurent, with its three-inch heels; the heels in the men's wear colle ctions of Rick Owens and Gareth Pugh (and Hood by Air); and the black velvet midcalf heeled boots Kanye West wore in Paris last year, to name just some examples.

In the end, his shoes were, as Prince once sang, a sign o' the times.

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