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Lending Glamour to a Cause

With summer is officially over, the fashion set in New York is back, ready for action. While fashion week, at the end of the day, is a commercial parade of a designer’s new wares, there’s always room for a good charitable cause or two, something that Glamour magazine opted to kick off the Spring ‘08 season with on Tuesday, September 4 at a private home in Soho.

Glamour’s editor-in-chief Cindi Leive hosted a party for “Fashion Gives Back,” their initiative to benefit the organization Malaria No More, which strives to fight the deadly disease in Africa by providing pregnant mothers and children with pesticide-treated nets as a preventative measure.

Glamour commissioned five young designers - Thakoon, Erin Fetherston, Marchesa, Peter Som and Jovovich-Hawk - to design a limited edition T-shirt, which will be sold on shopbop.com. For every T-shirt purchased there, Glamour and Malaria No More plan to donate three bed nets to women in Africa.

Glamour decided to get behind this particular cause because “it deals with women, and Glamour is very pro-woman,” said Xanthipi Joannides, Glamour’s fashion director.

It’s also a chance to highlight up-and-coming designers, whose names might not yet be familiar to a wide audience. Their designs ranged from Thakoon’s simple watercolor-like print of small heart in the corner of the shirt - “a bleeding heart” he said - to Erin Fetherston’s trompe l’oeil heart “necklace,” to the whimsical fairy scribble drawings by Jovovich-Hawk. Peter Som’s t-shirt offered a romantic, feminine interpretation of Chantilly lace trim and a velvet ribbon, while Marchesa’s T-shirt, a wild tangle of snakes, seemed an homage to their namesake, the eccentric muse Marchesa Luisa Casati, who was known for wearing live snakes around her neck to parties.

“The idea was really simple,” said Thakoon Panichgul. “I wanted to do something that was from the heart, and I think that it’s something that came across in the T-shirt.”

Each designer was paired with a celebrity guest for the evening: Thakoon with Amanda Peet, Erin Fetherston with Joy Bryant, Marchesa with Emily Mortimer, Peter Som with Ginnifer Goodwin and Jovovich-Hawk with Catalina Sandino Moreno.

“Fashion is a very visible platform, and so is acting - the actresses we’re here with - so if there’s a way we can bring awareness to a cause that people might not have heard about, then I think it’s great,” said Peter Som, who was recently named head designer at Bill Blass. “It’s a way for a creative person, for me to do what I do, with the T-shirts, and have it go to something important.”L

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