On a humid 90-degree day last July, nearly 400 people sat shoulder-to-shoulder inside the Fedder Building on East Main Street. Handheld fans and sweating bottles of Modelo took the edge off, and any discomfort was forgotten as the first-ever Rochester Fashion Runway program began. For the next two hours, more than 10 designers, 20 performing artists and 100 models presented the region’s most hip underground fashion show — one that sold out to standing room only and immediately outgrew the rambling warehouse in its first year.  To understand how such an event was executed in just 10 months requires understanding the team at work behind the scenes — in particular, founder and executive director Aliyah Delice. Rewind to December 2024, when then-restaurant server Delice and photographer Rudy Fabre (who also freelances for CITY Magazine) took a roadtrip down the thruway for Buffalo Fashion Runway, a large-scale event then in its second year. Fabre was shooting the show and invited his friend Delice because she was newly interested in the fashion scene after being recruited to model for boutique owner Chantiza Singh while serving her table at Roux on Park Avenue. When the duo arrived at Shea’s Buffalo for the show, Fabre was off to shoot, and Delice was tempted to pull out her phone but noticed everyone else was networking. So, she began talking to other local leaders her age until the program started.  “Then the lights go down and this girl is on a piano, singing. Then they have interpretive dancers on the runway, and I was like, ‘Oh, shit, I’m in for a show,’” Delice said. “Models come out, rappers come out, then this woman comes out of a suitcase. The whole ride home, I’m like, ‘Rudy, how the hell do we bring this back to Rochester? And he said, ‘you just do it.’” Delice had a winding career path up to that point. She spent time serving tables and working at a country club where she landed an internship to learn software engineering. There, she had a manager who identified her people skills.  “He said, “You talk too much to be a coder, I’m gonna take you under my wing and introduce you to other areas,” Delice said. “He introduced me to customer service and project management, which I liked, because it’s really just people management.” If Delice was going to pull off a version of Buffalo Fashion Runway in Rochester, she knew the team would be important. She had operations experience, but her fashion resume only extended to walking the runway a few times for Rochester Fashion Week, an annual fundraiser for The Center for Youth.  Delice’s first call? Rudy Fabre, who was there when the idea was born. Their next recruit was Tay Wheats, a creative with a knack for marketing. The team grew to six, then nine, now including Fphasieth Jimmeson, Ayanna Sampson, Rafael Rodriguez, Alexis McLemore, Allan Johnson  and Emily Burritt. Delice’s strategy, ultimately, was to find people smarter than her in other areas. “I know how to put an outfit together for myself, but I don’t know anything about PR. I didn’t know anything about model coordination,” she said. “But I know how to put events together and make people feel special, because that’s what I’ve been doing all my life.” The next task was convincing the team to pull off an event in just 10 months.  “I had some resistance, but I’ve been somebody that has constantly gotten stuck in the planning phase,” Delice said. “I knew if we really wanted to pull this off, it would have to be soon.” The biggest hurdle was finding a venue that aligned with the creative vision. At the time, Delice was bartending at Good Luck and one of the owners, Chuck Cerankosky, had been co-hosting and DJing raves at the Fedder Building, a cavernous space that houses WAYO Radio and other tenants. Delice reached out to the building manager, Patrick Dutton, on a whim. “As soon as I walked in there, I knew it was exactly where we were having the first show,’” she said. “I told Pat, ‘I don’t care what needs to happen to make this happen. We’re doing it here.’” Nine months later, the same space was filled with more than 400 fashion enthusiasts and creatives, most from BIPOC communities, in their 20s and 30s. Searnie Knight, a local social media influencer, co-emceed the Rochester Fashion Runway show with Adrian Franco. “I’d never been a host before, but I wanted to get behind this, especially since it was the first year,” Knight said. “I told them I was ready to hit the ground running whenever they were.” Knight has been involved in the local fashion scene since birth — her parents co-founded New York Stylee on Monroe Avenue 30 years ago as an answer to the outfit compliments they got while club and bar hopping. Now, Knight addresses her followers as “Styleestas” and runs marketing for the shop.  Knowing my parents’ small business and my dad being a designer as well, it’s so important to support other designers, fashion houses and people putting on fashion events,” Knight said. “There’s the artists that make art and perform music, and there’s art within fashion as well.” Knight also partners with many festivals around town to create content; last year, she spearheaded an initiative during Rochester Fringe Festival where 12 local designers reimagined Fringe apparel over the festival’s 12 days.  “The fashion and designer scene in Rochester is punching well above its weight in all aspects,” Knight said. ”And the way the RFR team was set, the way the designers were put together, the way the marketing was, I couldn’t believe that was their first show. They’re going to keep killing it.” The first sold-out RFR show created such a strong demand for more that Delice, who was concurrently apprenticing as a tattoo artist and now works full-time in that field, and her team went right into planning the next.   “We collected a lot of testimonials from people and screenshotted all the DMs and it was just crazy,” she said. “Everyone’s like, ‘we need this once a season, we need this bad.’” An hour into the casting call for this year’s RFR show last month, more than 60 models had strutted down the rooftop “runway” on the sixth floor of The Sibley Building on East Main Street. It was an unseasonable 80 degrees for mid-May, and the nine fashion designers and RFR staff watching auditions took frequent shelter under a few umbrellas scattered around the space.  Social entrepreneur Chad Williams, co-founder of Buffalo Fashion Runway, and a few other friends were there to support; the teams now stay in touch regularly. BFR was founded in 2023 by Williams and four others — Dan Abbotoy, Eman Wajed, Rodney Chatmon and Caine McDermott — as a “cultural non-profit leveraging fashion as a tool for storytelling, education, and collective action.”  Their five shows and various community outreach events have been so well-received that Williams, 27, who also has a clothing line called Due Process (named for a wrongful criminal accusation he experienced in 2019), left his full-time job to become executive director of BFR. Early in her planning process, Delice reached out to ask if she could replicate the model in Rochester. “That first meeting, the (BFR) team saw ourselves in (the RFR team), and we said, ‘yeah, definitely do this in Rochester,’”  Williams said. “They’ve been doing a phenomenal job. We want them to keep soaring and winning and moving in unity as they do great things.” As for Delice and the RFR team, that’s the goal. The 2026 RFR will take place September 5 at The Hochstein School, 50 N. Plymouth Ave., which allows for a little more planning time.  “We love the history behind (The Hochstein School),” Delice said. “The ties to the Black community, the ties to the female community — we love being able to shine a light on Rochester itself.”  Where last year’s “Veil of Influence” was about the past, the 2026 show, “Living Provenance,” will focus on the present.  “It matters more now than ever, especially with the political climate that we’re in,” said Delice. “At the end of the day, we’re all creatives: people who put on outfits, shoot pictures, design clothes, create mediums of art. I hope we touch more of our community. I hope more people know who we are and what we stand for.” instagram.com/rochesterfashionrunway The post The team behind Rochester Fashion Runway is just getting started appeared first on CITY Magazine. Arts. Music. Culture.. ...read more read less