"YA/YA (Young Aspirations/Young
Artists), Inc. is a non-profit arts and social
service organization whose
mission is to provide educational experiences and
opportunities that empower
artistically talented inner-city youth to be
professionally self-sufficient
through creative self-expression. "
Programs like YA/YA are so important... and so are the people who donate their time and money to insure that they succeed. That's why I fully support Fancy Pony Land and the line's creator Lorna Leedy. She offered her expertise as a mentor to YA/YA's Inner-City Threads program in 2003... and continues to make fantastic designs today... I don't know about you, but I continue to be bored with what fashion is supposed to be and continue to be inspired with what fashion is... the originality of brands like Fancy Pony Land and the styles created by inner-city kids (whom I've always thought bring the best ideas to this industry) are what keep fashion alive.
In a very contrived sense, the fashion world works like this: Trend spotters, who work for various trend spotting/ fashion companies, get paid to scour the world looking for the latest "trends". The best place to look for trends, a fashion designer and former trend spotter once told me, is on the streets. She said the kids in the cities are the ones who dictate where fashion is going... The trend spotters watch the kids, take extensive notes on their style and sell it back to the big design houses who then repackage it and sell it back to us as fashion and couture. Now I'm not saying every trend comes about this way, and I'm not putting down the concept of trend spotting or what it can do for haute couture. But like most things, fashion is simple and the ideas that seem so large and exciting on the runway are just as large and exiting in the places from which they originated... I guess it just depends on where you want to look, and who you want to support.