Dallas’ Own SoHo Scene

It was as if we had walked off a New York City street and into a hip gallery in SoHo. But in reality, the private opening reception for the exhibition, “Age of the Supermodel: The Backstage Photographs of Donna DeMari,” was held inside a raw, warehouse-style space at Galleria Dallas.

Geographically we may have been thousands of miles from New York or Paris, but the exhibition’s vibe was nothing short of haute-couture cool: The show was a blockbuster, an enormous concrete makeshift gallery bedecked with DeMari’s larger-than-life photographs of top models backstage during the Paris couture shows of the early 1990s.

On one wall, a non-stop stream of video footage from Christian Lacroix’s runway shows streamed; on a nearby vignette a trio of looks from Lacroix stood on view — each piece on loan from the Texas Fashion Collection at the University of North Texas.

As for music? All sounds came by way of the ’90s, having been pulled straight from the fashion show playlists of the era. Sexy, sophisticated, fashionable, the exhibition opening drew an eager contingent of art lovers, creative types and fashion sirens alike.

PC Seen: Photographer Donna DeMari; Galleria Dallas’ Martha Hinojosa; 1814 magazine’s Michael Thomas and Jocelyn Meister; models Chandra North and Jan Strimple; plus attendees including Tessa Mugica, Frederik Broden, Maureen Dalton Wolfe, and Holly Quartaro.