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Gen Art Styles Winners Take the Cake

"Project Runway" isn't the only design competition making noise these days: Gen Art's Styles competition, now in its ninth year, presented the latest crop of finalists at a runway show hosted by E! Fashion Police's Robert Verdi on Tuesday night in New York.

The winners - E.Y. Wada, A3, FORM, Dragana Rikanovic and Black Sheep + Prodigal Son - each took home $5000 for best women's ready to wear, men's, evening, women's avant-garde and accessories, respectively.

After narrowing the international pool of applicants to 25 designers in five categories – over 800 submissions from 31 countries and 35 states – finalists showed two looks each at Tuesday's sold-out event.

"They're very sophisticated," said Lee Trimble, Gen Art's fashion director, about this year's finalists. "The trends overall are very interesting – we're seeing a lot of dark palettes, a lot of sleek silhouettes. I thought I was going to see a lot more volume, sort of repeating what we had done in the past on the runways, but instead, I saw a lot of things that reminded me of the upside down triangular silhouettes, like the ones we saw on the runways in Paris."

High profile members from the fashion industry - model Liya Kebede, designers Cynthia Rowley, John Bartlett, Michael Vollbracht of Bill Blass, Reem Acra, Trina Turk, IMG's Fern Mallis, Elle Style Director Isabel Dupre and Jeffrey boutique owner Jeffrey Kalinsky - voted on the spot to pick the winners of the $5000 prize in each of the categories.

"Nothing too crazy," said Elle's Isabel Dupre before the show about what she would be looking for as a judge. "Sometimes designers can go a little bit over the top….with something you would wear on Halloween."

While the women's ready to wear winner, E.Y. Wada, fit the bill of conventionally pretty clothes – loose white dresses and tailored cropped jackets, the men's winner, A3, stood out from fellow finalists with their riskier color palette – pale pink, khaki and white – swapping moody for preppy.

An additional $10,000 prize went to Wanda Marie Sanders, the winner of Perrier's Bubbling Under award. For this, contestants were asked to produce sketches interpreting the theme "Pop." Sanders' sketches for mod '60s shifts took inspiration from Pop Art godfathers Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol.

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