A Bushwick designer turned a Manhattan-bound L train car into a models’ runway last week with an impromptu fashion show.
Kim Mesches figured he could reach more people if she had her show on the city’s most popular form of public transportation instead of the stages hidden behind the velvet ropes of Manhattan’s fashion week.
“I wanted to make something that was more about art and accessibility,” Mesches said.
The fashion show started at the Bedford Avenue stop. Mesches’s five models dressed up in her creations and paraded to the station from Deluxe Salon on N. Fourth Street. The models struck poses in the station for a while, and then strode up and down the catwalk of a subway-car’s aisle as the train ran between Bedford Avenue and Union Square, and did the same on a train back to Bedford, repeating the trip twice, and stopping between rides to pose on the platforms.
Pictures of the event show riders ignoring the show, taking pictures, and looking on with bemused expressions. That was mostly what Mesches expected.
“I think it went pretty well,” he said. “I am glad about the reactions and that we did not get arrested.”
Mesches said he might stage other guerrilla fashion shows around Brooklyn in the future, but that he will probably not do it on the L train again.
“It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” he said.
