San Francisco Fashion Week 2007 2

San Francisco's fledging Fashion Week has put away its stilettos. After four years of trying to generate sponsorships, industry interest and buzz, Erika Gessin, who produced the annual multiday event of catwalk shows and workshops, has called it quits because of mounting monetary challenges. Images View Larger Image "The decision was a long time coming," Gessin said last week. "It was getting harder and harder to pull it off. I'm recently married, we've got a new mortgage; I just couldn't put my financial future on the line again like I had been doing. Four years is just not enough to build credibility." Held the last weekend in August, the shows were a platform for emerging artists as well as bigger names. They were first held at the Palace of Fine Arts - in 2005 Levi's was on the roster - then moved to the bigger and more expensive Galleria at the San Francisco Design Center in 2007. Gessin, 31, created the event on sheer determination and dreams of putting the city in the spotlight. There was positive national press. Some designers came back year after year. Attendance grew each year; last year about 2,000 people came to the runway shows, spread out over three days. But SFFW was very expensive to produce, and some of the Bay Area's most established designers, like Erika Tanov, never signed on. Tanov, who has eponymous boutiques in San Francisco, Berkeley and New York, was among those who didn't feel the need to produce a runway show in San Francisco. Unknowns had trouble coughing up the $2,000 to $10,000 it took to participate, and big sales didn't materialize. Ticket prices ranged from $45 to $150 per evening. Local and national buyers didn't come to the shows, and there was no "front row" buzz. Mayor Gavin Newsom popped in one year but didn't stay; local young fashion luminaries, like Victoria and Vanessa Traina, for instance, were no-shows. In April, Gessin sent out an upbeat e-mail to some designers, floating the idea of holding this year's shows on the roof of the W Hotel in San Francisco, adding that if there wasn't enough interest, she would cancel the event. "We spent a lot of time outreaching to national buyers and the media," Gessin said. "If it didn't happen, it wasn't for lack of trying, and overall, I think we did really well on a regional level." Gessin is now back in the corporate world, at Ammo Marketing,
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