Smith and Bybee

A while back I had the opportunity to do a work trade with my friend Nate. Nataniel Shapiro does odd jobs for my company. He has a furniture design degree from RISD and does all kinds of beautiful sculpture and fabrication. For a while he was teaching me welding and metal working and I was teaching him how to make men's dress shirts. Through this collaboration Smith and Bybee was born. Smith and Bybee is name of our new menswear line. We will be showing our first collection at "The Forecast" a Mercury fashion event. The Mercury being our local weekly rag. The event will take place on April 26th at the Portland Center Stage/Gerding Theater/the Armory at 128 NW Eleventh Avenue, Portland, OR. I believe that it will be taking place in the smaller event space, lobby area as opposed to the actual stage itself. The press for the event is still to come and I'm sure it will involve more specifics like time, price, and all that good stuff. I'm not totally sure who all is going to be showing but it will involve some if not all of the usual portland suspects, Adam Arnold, Emily Katz, Seaplane, etc. They are also interested in featuring a small collection of "budding" designers, being people that haven't done many public events. Each "budding" designer would have one look and then those designers would be shown together as part of the show. If anybody is interested I can put you in touch with the mercury. I know that there will be a 25$ application fee but no participation fee.

Our collection is inspired by the textiles and details of classic American work wear. It will be six looks over all. I'm not sure how many looks other people are doing but we had rather short notice about this and settled on six as a do-able number. This will be my first real show and I'm so ridiculously excited about it. I hope everybody comes.