Lucy Gellman Photos
Seven p.m. on the Friday of Labor Day weekend on Orange Street, and Neville Wisdom was fiddling with a set of floodlights. They flashed on and off and on again, winking to a growing crowd who murmured in anticipation.
Finishing another biscotti sale, Tom Panzella and Teri Bernet of Cedarhurst Cafe scurried to find their seats. Jimi Patterson, who had been vigorously mixing drinks at a 116 Crown booth, stopped what he was doing and opened his eyes wide. At the other end of the street, a line of photographers finalized the settings on their cameras and settled into position. The lights blazed on.
A little over three years after opening his original dress shop in the Ninth Square and spreading a gospel of form and functionality, Wisdom surprised New Haveners Friday once more with his vintagey fall line, modeled by both a familiar cast of NW models and women — Lauren Beslow, Terrie Griffin, Susan Cruz, Ruth Mayer, Pat Kalba, and Denise Lim — who look like his actual clientele. As a part of Town Green’s On9 First Friday festivities, the fashion show also included food from Thali, Whole G, and Cedarhurst Cafe, end-of-summer cocktails from 116 Crown, and other treats.
All of which made for a very good show as dark crept in around the crowd and music blared, models drawing exuberant whoops, cheers, and claps as they strutted their stuff on the runway …
… publicly embraced that bodies do in fact come in different shapes and sizes …
… and showed off looks fierce enough to admonish even the toughest critics.
The use of “plus size” models — that is the industry’s term for any woman over a size 8 — may be fashionably late for a designer known for his small-batch and bespoke dresses, which start at a size four, but it is most certainly better late than never. Moments after the show, Wisdom described himself as “newly energized” as fans and potential patron milled around his shop, inspecting the new designs.
“A lot of times people come to us and they say ‘I can’t wear this.’ We wanted to show the similarity between our models and everyone else — that our models are just doing a profession … that everybody looks hot in Neville Wisdom,” he added.
