A night filled with personal anecdotes and heartfelt confessions transformed a room full of strangers into old friends.
Boston Fashion Week’s annual Glam Slam was hosted on Oct. 18 at WBUR Cityspace with a lineup of guest speakers from Boston’s fashion scene.
Glam Slam is one part of Boston’s Fashion Week, which lasted from Oct. 13-19, a tradition created to elevate local designers and provide them with a platform to tell their stories.
The event, which marks BFW’s 30th anniversary, aims to create an environment for people in Boston’s fashion industry to network and showcase themselves to the community, according to the BFW website.
“We thought it was really important to bring this human element into Fashion Week,” said Jay Calderin, the founder and executive director of BFW. “Our tagline is ‘Boston fashion is smart’…for us it means that there’s so much more to it than just the latest fashion show or party.”
This is the third Glam Slam that WBUR CitySpace has hosted after a brief hiatus from 2020 to 2023.
Calderin said BFW aims to “act as a community organizer,” bringing attention to the fashion industry through these events.
“The speakers, when we invite them, we ask them to share something that has affected them, something that feels really important to them, that’s memorable, kind of at this visceral level,” Calderin said.
The idea for Glam Slam emerged during a brainstorming session for BFW, when a stylist proposed creating an event where industry professionals could share their stories.
After they set the plan in motion, Calderin said the event took off and “became its own machine.”
Nearly a decade later, the love for their community drives these creatives to keep Glam Slam alive, Calderin said.
“One storyteller, he was a Verizon technician and he had a love of shoes,” said Bethany Van Delft, a returning emcee for the event. “And he went and he studied shoemaking… This isn’t just playing dress up. There is so much compassion, hard work, heartbreak and sometimes triumph.”
Van Delft is connected to the community through her early modeling career and connections with members of the Boston fashion industry.
At the event, Van Delft introduced a diverse lineup of models, designers and directors, who all shared their experiences in the fashion industry within the Boston community.
Among these talents was Carlos Villamil, an associate professor of industrial design at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. He shared his journey with sustainable fashion and how he wants to pass these principles forward to his students.
“It was one of the most rewarding experiences to me being able to talk about design, teach about sustainability, and on top of that being able to connect the idea of zero waste design as a design principle,” Villamil said.
Attendees cheered, sighed and chuckled as each speaker talked about the love of their respective fields. The raw recollections broke down emotional defenses, uniting listeners in shared catharsis.
“In general, I just feel like they all have very authentic stories about fashion, and how fashion can help you identify with your passions in life,” said attendee Ereni Markos, a professor at Suffolk University. “It’s good exposure. We need a little fashion in our lives. Boston could benefit from that.”
At its heart, Glam Slam is about centering humanity in an industry that can so often be sensationalized — and it continues to touch everyone involved.
“This is easily my favorite event of the week because I sit here, and I learned about my community,” Calderin said. “It makes me feel more connected to them, and I feel like the public gets to see that human side of our local fashion industry.”
