Fashion Your Mind fundraiser helps cancer patients

It's a long way from a sewing class to a runway show, but you've got to start somewhere, as any fashion designer knows.

Just ask Karen Caldwell and Zoe Magee, two Bay Area designers whose works were included in a fashion show at the Westin St. Francis hotel hosted by Fashion Your Mind Organization, a nonprofit that teaches students to sew and draft patterns and educates them about entrepreneurial opportunities.

About 300 guests at the black-tie event paid as much as $150 a ticket to watch "Giving to Live" at Alexandra's, the penthouse suite, where the catwalk featured men's and women's fashions. Gelareh Design Studio, a custom apparel company at the base of Potrero Hill, Oxford Way Men's Clothiers of Richmond, and Naracamicie, an Italian company with a boutique on Sutter Street, rounded out the roster.

Each designer offered up a dozen looks, with Charleston Pierce producing the show and coaxing the models to donate their time. The event doubled as a fundraiser for people living with cancer, with funds raised going to individuals referred by South Bay hospitals, said Tiffany May, founder of Fashion Your Mind Organization, founded in 2008.

Caldwell learned to sew in a seventh-grade home economics class. But the inspiration for her silver-screen-starlet looks with simple, clean lines came from her grandmother, who worked for MGM Studios in Los Angeles and was a friend of costume designer Edith Head's.

"I used to get scraps from sewing shops and made something out of it," she said. "I'd watch my grandmother put something together, like sewing two scarves together to make it longer."

On the runway, there were dramatic nighttime gowns in black, and daywear for men, but the raciest looks belonged to Zoe Magee, who founded Zoe Bikini in the Mission District and makes each bathing suit by hand. She showed pieces from her 2010 and spring 2011 collection in monochromatic burgundy, white and charcoal.

"I altered clothing in junior high and turned it punk-mod. People are doing a lot of deconstructing and altering now," Magee said. "That's how I learned a lot, playing with premade clothes. ... One summer, I needed a bikini." A swimwear designer was born.

That should come as good news for students of Fashion Your Mind Organization, which May created a year after she tried to start her own line of daywear. She had previously worked with foster children in Vallejo.

"I like inspirational prints on clothing," she said. And, apparently, events that motivate people to do good.

This article appeared on page S - 6 of the San Francisco Chronicle