Satin, tulle, chiffon, ruffles, rhinestones and lace ruled Sunday at the Arneson River Theatre. The occasion was the annual Marisol Deluna Foundation Community Fashion Show, an event featuring participants with special needs and students from 20 area schools.
The purpose of the event is to showcase the creativity of participants through original fashion designs, and to bring awareness to San Antonio’s special needs community, said Marisol Deluna, an Alamo Heights High School graduate and Manhattan-based fashion designer.
Deluna said her goal for the yearly event is to mentor and inspire young people of all abilities to discover the power of expressing themselves creatively, just as she had been mentored and inspired by people who believed in her as a “regular middle-class kid” in high school.
As more than 100 students and show participants lined up along the River Walk preparing to take the stage, Deluna twirled in her Argentine blue tulle puff dress and said, “It’s just really important for creative people to know that people see them.”
Princesses and puppies
An audience of 200 lined the grass and stone steps of the Arneson’s inclined seating area, waiting to see family members and friends strolling across the stage sporting their custom fashions.
Emcee Mary Oakes of Emissary Pageants International Congress introduced each among the stream of participants as they took the stage to show off their designs.
Ta’Leah Baker started the show with a brief tumbling routine featuring a flying somersault, to showcase her red two-piece dress featuring puffy sleeves and a heart-shaped corset crest dedicated to her love for stuffed animals.
The parade of participants twirled and preened in ornate, full-length ball gowns, flare dresses, crop tops, mini-skirts and imaginative fashions upcycled from bedsheets and thrift store fabrics.
Participating designers and models hailed from schools including Cambridge Elementary, Edgewood Fine Arts Academy, Smithson Valley High School and the University of the Incarnate Word, which was represented by several award-winning dresses from its annual Red Dress Fashion Show.
Beyond the show
Clark High School senior Jaylen Phillips modeled a throwback tapestry dress worn in honor of her grandmother. Phillips is serving a term as a LULAC Council No. 2 Fiesta la Feria de las Flores princess, along with fellow princesses Isabel Selover and Madison Calderon of East Central High School.
Phillips said volunteering as models for the fashion show event “brings some new personal growth and new skills to learn that might help you along the way.”
All three agreed that confidence is the main takeaway for both participating designers and models. “It’s a way to show yourself and show that anyone can do anything,” Phillips said.
Prior to the show, Karen Meyer watched her daughter Leah practice walking the stage and twirling her light blue satin ribbon.
Leah Meyer was first introduced to Deluna by Deluna’s sister Linda Luna Duffy, a special needs teacher who was honored as Texas Teacher of the Year in 2001 and died in 2017.
The foundation’s Linda Luna Duffy Creative Hope Initiative, which supports the fashion show and mentors who work with students at the foundation’s headquarters in La Villita, is named for Luna Duffy to honor her memory.
Meyer and Deluna began collaborating on a line of tieless aprons and accessible kitchen items dubbed Little Pickle and Patty Cake, made in part because Meyer’s Down syndrome affects her ability to tie knots.
Little mermaid, big dreams
Meyer said she’s set to open The Mermaid Cafe, a specialty coffee shop located just north of the Blanco and Bitters Roads intersection, in early 2025. The cafe, co-managed by Meyer’s father, Drew Meyer, will serve coffee and gluten-free baked goods — and will employ a staff made up of mostly people with disabilities.
“When you come in to The Mermaid Cafe, you will be greeted and waited on and served by an individual with a disability. Our goal is that you will see it’s no different, that we’re all people. We all want the same things,” said Karen Meyer.
Karen Meyer praised the inclusivity of the fashion show and said it serves both people with disabilities such as her daughter and participants of all abilities who interact and collaborate as models and mentors.
Of her daughter’s ongoing participation, Meyer said that “because we’ve done it so many times, she’s very confident, and so she comes in and she mixes and mingles, and it just it brings them all together. Maybe they haven’t sat next to somebody with a disability and talked fashion design, but Leah can do that.”
And while Deluna praised the student designers who have become mentors for new participants, including Frankie Rivera, Jolene Crisp and Ava Vargas, Meyer lauded the efforts of the fashion show’s founder.
“Marisol has the biggest heart. She has this personality that fills a room, and she wants to help everybody,” Meyer said.
