LIVE FASHION 13

BACKGROUND for Fashion Series Background:

My name is Dan Harley & I run a fashion series called ‘Live Fashion’, conceived in Milan (while shooting fashion week) in 2012 waiting in a street with hundreds of people trying to get into the ‘Fendi ft Karl Lagerfeld’ show – it was a great show but there was so much great energy left outside on the streets with everybody (most people) who didn’t get into the show – i thought then that social media would eventually have the power to change the traditional fashion week runway experience to make things a lot more interactive & immediate so i started the series – so far I’ve produced a show in Paris & 12 shows over various locations around London

MOTIVATION for Aids Awareness Show:

We staged our 13th Show (link attached below) during Men’s Fashion Week last Saturday (10th June) catwalking around the streets of Soho.

It was an Aids Awareness show, inspired after i thought i’d been exposed to HIV earlier in the year & the relief on getting a clear diagnosis – having had a glimpse into the prospect of what a life of antiretroviral drugs & stigma might look like

We used the ‘O+’ collection of an HIV+ designer called Jacob Alexander who started an app called The Positive Project following the stigma he experienced after being diagnosed in 2015 & went on to do a TED talk last year

Award winning Soho sexual health & HIV clinic 56 Dean St, supplied free condoms for us to give out during the show & the team from Youth Stop Aids joined us on the day with a banner & leaflets for their mission to end Aids by 2030

We also had Kala Kala driving us slowly along Old Compton St & up Dean St to Soho Square Gardens in his multicolored Kala mobile as well as body painters Mimmi Harding & Lucy Close painting audience members throughout the day