CONTENT Collective Show at the Ace Hotel (Room 225)

Featured in Button Magazine--June/July 2009

8-page Spread featured in Antler Magazine--Issue 3.

Art Institute graduate (and Mercury fashion show alum) Janeane Marie is another hot name on the ticket. A former intern for green-fashion icon Anna Cohen, and more recently of Project Runway hometown winner Leanne Marshall, Marie's combination of influences is downright titillating for local design connoisseurs. Glimpses of the spring line reveal muted, ladylike pieces with a European sensibility (a white suit's ankle offers a crisp whiff of thoughtful placement, a creamy shell top with a fringed collar recalls Marshall's signature balance of embellishment and restraint). Although one has the sense that Marie might eventually benefit from exploring some of her more outrageous tastes, hers is a design voice that is a pleasure to watch coming into its own.

We aren’t familiar with all of the designers showing in the For Alec Fashion Show Benefit tonight, but among them is Janeane Marie, one of our favorite emerging designers in Portland, and the few photos we’ve seen of her spring collection look sharp.

The work of Janeane Marie, a onetime intern of eco-fashion star Anna Cohen, and current junior at the Art Institute of Portland, is marked by simplicity and thoughtfulness. Committed to designing and producing apparel that leaves a light footprint on the environment, Marie is also drawn to minimalism in design, and often looks to inspiration outside of the fashion world, in nature, music, and literature, and she carries a sketch book with her to mark down ideas as they come.

It was also our introduction to the talented Janeane McSpadden (In Love & Memory). Still a junior at the Art Institute (which we find hard to believe) McSpadden showed beautiful, well-made, simple little dresses with subtle details. “I like to strip almost everything away, then add something back in,” she said. Our favorite 3/4 sleeve tunic dress in a beige raw silk had an angled back yoke, almost an inside secret between the designer and wearer, so subtle the design element. McSpadden, who interned with Anna Cohen, showed some amazing concept boards as well that we’d like to see come into fruition. We’ll definitely be hearing much more about her.

Project Runway Feature in the Oregonian

"Fashion," she says, "is a way to have a craft-inspired thing, with a lot of historical resonance, that can be super-creative and super-modern but have an everyday application.”