By Michael Braithwaite, Ironing Board Collective (Source: The Bay Citizen)

SF Fashion Week founder Owen Geronimo says the Bay Area has plenty of style — and he’s working to cultivate it.

A few months ago, a New York Times article by Guy Trebay about San Francisco fashion (or, more specifically, the lack thereof) raised my hackles a bit. Articles and opinion pieces about the Bay Area’s subpar fashion scene abound, but little is written about what we do well and how we can do it even better.

OwenGerominoSFFAMA founder Owen Geronimo

San Francisco’s fashion community is growing quickly. Stores featuring primarily local designers are popping up all over San Francisco and the East Bay: Union Square’s Shotwell carries two floors’ worth of drool-worthy designs produced mainly by local talents, and the SF-born and -bred House of Hengst recently received a flurry of press — although sadly, most of the attention was because they moved to New York.

[There’s also Project San Francisco, an annual runway show made by locals, on Feb. 17 –Ed.]

So, on the eve of New York’s semiannual Fashion Week (which runs Feb. 9-17), The Bay Citizen approached Owen Geronimo, creator of the San Francisco Fashion and Merchants Alliance, or SFFAMA, and producer of San Francisco Fashion Week, about the current state and future of San Francisco’s fashion scene. He had a lot to say about how San Francisco can build a strong local fashion economy that works well for designers, merchants and the fashionably independently minded citizens of our fair city.