Behind the scenes at this year's Style Issue

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Behind the scenes at this year's Style Issue

POSTED: Friday, March 26, 2010, 8:00 PM

Filed Under: Shopping Fashion

Last Monday, I worked on the photoshoot for this week's Style Issue. By help, I mean I held the photo reflector for a few hours with photog Neal Santos, Shopping Spree goddess Felicia D'Ambrosio, and art department head Reseca Glasser. It was interesting to see what goes into a City Paper photoshoot. You can see outtakes from their work above.

But I didn't really understand the goal of the shoot, what Felicia — who also worked on last year's style issue — was trying to achieve. I caught up with Felicia this week to get some background on the shoot and Philadelphia's fashion scene.

City Paper: What's the inspiration for the models and the shoot?

Felicia D'Ambrosio: Carrie Collins comes from Philadelphia's bike culture. She dressed Brown [aka Jeff Cuellar], who's very independent-minded, but he works for Urban, so there's an interesting juxtaposition there. Donja Love and Keisha Kay — Donja is a little harder, his influences are very diverse; he pulls from high fashion, street style, from hip-hop, from films and television. He's sort of an assimilator of styles. He dressed rapper Ethel Cee for our style issue last year, and I was so impressed by his personal style that I wanted to feature him and have him photographed, because he's just very original. The Topstitch girls [Linda Smyth and Tina Nguyen] are designers, and they have their own stories.

CP: How did you guys come up with the location?

FD'A: Our original idea was to put the seamless backdrop out on the street in the Italian Market. W wanted to make the clothes pop against a white background so they'd be really clear, but we wanted to capture a little of Philadelphia, too. The weather was pretty rough out there, so at the last minute, the weekend before the shoot, Reseca went out and scouted some locations that were indoors but still gave off that Philadelphia feeling. The boxes of produce added a kind of authenticity there.

CP: How would you characterize fashion in Philadelphia?

FD'A: Philadelphia doesn't really have an institutionalized fashion industry like, for example, New York. Our fashion comes from the fact that this is an art school town. We have lots of fashion design programs, we have lots of artists and people that are printers, people who are always kind of making things. So a lot of the style comes up from the street rather than down from the designers. When we do have designers, they tend to be smaller and more independent.

You have lots of people who work for Urban Outfitters, so you have that influence too, where people are working in style but it's a much more organic style than New York. So there's no real authority on fashion in Philly. Vintage has its own trend trajectory, freestyle has its own trajectory and then you have other people who are interpreting high fashion in their own way.

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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