D.C. fashion may sound like an oxymoron to some. But in fact, there’s a rich tradition of local designers and trend setters in our region. Fashion-forward residents could at one time find their streetwear at local staples like Universal Madness on Georgia Avenue (which made a return in 2017), and Up Against the Wall in Georgetown (which closed in 2010). And today, we’re seeing a lot of independent pop-up shops, flea markets, and online stores selling boutique fashion by local designers.

Fashion designers working here pull from deep roots in a range of styles. Of course, there’s the influence of high-end brand names. But fashion in the District also has roots in streetwear, much of it inspired by Black culture in the region.

So who are the designers defining fashion in D.C. now? We spoke to three local designers who recently displayed collections at DC Fashion Week. Each fills a specific niche in fashion–in some cases because they saw no other designers doing so. They come from varying backgrounds and career trajectories, but each hopes to show the rest of the world what the District can offer.

Etta Grove

Etta Grove is a private-label brand of hand-crafted footwear with women’s sizes all the way up to a 14 medium; the brand also designs handbags. Owner and creative director Alexis Howard started the brand with her two daughters in September 2021. Originally an attorney, this is a second career for Howard, and one that came about due to a need she saw.

“For decades, I have thought about and wanted to start a footwear brand targeted to those who wear extended sizes in women’s footwear,” Howard says. “It was something that I always just talked about. So I decided to found a footwear brand whose niche is extended women sizes.”

Howard’s interest specifically in making shoes for women who need sizes beyond the usual 10 or 11 comes from her friends, family, and her own experience struggling to find fashionable shoes in larger sizes.

“There was a time that I felt like it would be better for me to paint a shoe box, cut a hole in it, and wear that around because it was so limited in the options,” Howard says. “I mean, being 10 years old or 11 years old wearing a size 10, if I wanted sneakers, I had to get a men’s sneaker.”

Howard is a native Washingtonian, but she found a great deal of support online from the British shoe designer community on how to build her business. Howard learned quickly that there weren’t a lot of footwear factories in the U.S. that could meet her price and shoe size specifications. She ended up partnering with a factory in Spain to make her products. And since the business is primarily self-funded, the shoes are sold through pre-orders and small batches.

XYZ Dimension

XYZ Dimension is a luxury fashion brand with Chinese and American influences, notable for its hand-sewn embroidery and hand-painted fabrics. Their company is not just designing for the next generation; they are all Gen Z’ers still in high school. Designers Haichan Xu and YanZe Geng are only 18 years old. Xu is based in Potomac, Maryland, while Geng lives in McLean, Virginia. Their 17-year-old CFO Chunting Zeng is based in Hong Kong, and their head of technology is 18-year-old Zhou Zixiang based in the UK. They started the brand in 2022, funding it themselves. This was their first DC Fashion Week appearance, and similar to the way they approach their work, they had to get creative to get a shot at being in a show.

Zeng tells the story of how the two young designers got the word out about a fashion show at their high school.

“So [Haichan] and [YanZe], like, just dressed up in our clothes. Because they’re minors, they can’t get into a networking party because it’s in a club or a bar,” Zeng says. “So they stood outside at the door of the club, just advertising themselves to those fashion people, ‘Hey, we have a fashion show that’s coming up at our high school.’”

Ean Williams, the Executive Director of DC Fashion Week, came to that high school show, and was wowed by what he saw. He encouraged them to apply to DC Fashion Week.

Their hope is to make their brand not just high-end but actually stylish, noting that certain brands in the industry are popular due to name recognition, but don’t carry much originality in their designs.

“I’m not going to name brands, but this brand looks really similar,” Zeng says. “This designer who used to work at A brand, moved into B brand, and now he’s at C brand, but why does the clothes in the A, B, [and] C brand all look the same?”

The trio says their goal is to make high-quality, practical fashion for people to wear every day. 

They also recognize that high-end designer clothing isn’t accessible to everyone. As they grow, they hope to explore eco-friendly lines that are slightly less expensive.

Jah Kente International Fashion House

High fashion can seem out of reach for many consumers, with exorbitant prices on items from classic brands like Dior, Gucci, and Louis Vuitton. 

“When you hear about fashion, you see cocktail high-end priced dresses and some of these fashions [are] not affordable to the regular person,” CEO of Jah Kente International Evelyn Joe says. “Jah Kente’s brand is affordable to low-income.”

Not only is high-end fashion inaccessible to many, but pursuing fashion as a career can also seem out of reach, between tuition for fashion school and the many obstacles to securing funding to launch one’s own fashion line.

Jah Kente is not a for-profit fashion company. It’s a non-profit program aimed at training young students interested in the arts. One of their sub-categories, Fiber or Textile Arts and Fashion Arts, is centered on those hoping to pursue a career in fashion. The program originated from the Marion Barry Summer Youth Employment program in 2021. 

“The objective is that we reduce unemployment,” Joe says. “The impact objective is to nurture the immediate ability of those who want to get into the creative industries, specifically the fashion industry, to give them the skills, not only not only the technical skills, but the soft skills, to do so.”

At DC Fashion Week, works on the runway were designed by multiple students in the program, including Marcia Rector, Kayla Peterson, Yaphet Neguisse, Ashley Torres, and Jailynn Brown.

Reflecting on the style landscape in D.C., Joe says the region’s fashion could be described as a “mixed salad bowl,” capturing styles and fashion from various cultural perspectives. “There is a danger to define fashion from a Western perspective,” Joe says. She says Jah Kente students are inspired by their own lived experiences and backgrounds, which could be Ethiopian, Nigerian, Cameroonian, or wherever their roots lie.

“[It’s the students’] cultural relative perspective of what fashion is and what it means to them,” Joe says.

Eileen Bleyer Millinery

One final local designer caught our eye, a milliner who was posthumously honored at this year’s DC Fashion Week. 

Eileen Bleyer came late to fashion design. She was in her 70s when she began creating one-of-a-kind couture hats and fascinators, which were featured in DC Fashion Week multiple times in recent years. One of Bleyer’s designs was added to the permanent museum collection of the Maryland Center of History and Culture.

She passed away in 2022, and she was honored on the final night of DC Fashion Week with 15 hats on the runway.

We happened to meet Bleyer’s daughter, Joan Cox, and learned that the designer was inspired by her grandmother and aunts growing up, and began designing clothes for her dolls as a child.

“She grew up loving fashion and loving hats, and then life got in the way,” Cox says “Then at 77, she’s like, ‘I just I got to do this.’ This creativity just came out of her. She made one, then another, then another, and they got more and more amazing. Within a year, she was at New York Fashion Week from when she made her first one.”

She showed 40 looks in New York, and each hat had its own personality with floral arrangements, feathered fascinators, and unique shapes that look more like art pieces than simple hats.

“I was there for her in the first walk in 2019, and she was ecstatic,” Cox says. “Like being up on this stage, seeing her creations walking down the runway was just like, I think, probably the most amazing moment of her life.”