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Becca McCharen-Tran Survives Fashion Week With Plants From Miami and Chocolate-Covered Ginger From Trader Joe’s

“After that, I had a fitting with Leyna Bloom. I love Leyna. We wanted to have her walk in the show, but she’s been out of town and there wasn’t enough time, so she sat front-row instead. Leyna’s been walking for us since 2016, and she’s got an amazing walk. She’s a dancer, so she’s so good with movement and she’s so talented—when we first saw her walk, we were like, ‘Okay, yes, definitely you.’

“Then I had to fix a crotch seam that was messed up. Even when we were pattern-making the garment, there were issues. We had to improvise and do a lot of hand-stitching. I was looking to see if it was passable.”

McCharen-Tran fixing a seam on Look 3 ahead of Chromat’s fall 2019 fashion show

Courtesy of Becca McCharen-Tran

Model on the runway of Chromat's Fall 2019 show — Look 3 on the runway

Victor VIRGILE

The Final Touches

“That night I also finalized the beauty look for each model. I really wanted the makeup and the hair to speak to our overall theme for the runway show. I wanted it to trigger an urgency within the viewers, to tell the story of going from lush, tropical, beautiful plant life into plastic pollution and climate change. It went from big blush to greens and more sour colors, to see that disintegration from healthy to unhealthy.

“Ben Ritter, who is my right-hand at Chromat, had been doing a lot of work on the final look of the collection over the past two weeks. He had been taking all of the water bottles from our studio and then cutting them up and melting them over candles to make them all different shapes. They were spray-painted, and once they were dry, we put them onto a fishing net. The night before, it was a matter of positioning each flower and each water bottle where it needed to be and hand-sewing them onto the fishing net.

Members of the Chromat team put the finishing touches on the train of a dress — Members of the Chromat team finishing the train on the final look of the fall 2019 collection

Courtesy of Becca McCharen-Tran

A model on the runway at Chromat's Fall 2019 show — Look 30, the last of the show, on the runway

Victor VIRGILE

“The live floral element was an interesting new twist on our show prep. We’ve done a lot of amazing collaborations—it’s definitely my favorite part of being a fashion designer and doing Fashion Week. I love working with people outside of the industry: scientists, choreographers, and now florists. It’s just fun to work with someone who doesn’t know the rules and who’s coming from a completely different place. With the flowers, it was the first time I worked with something that could actually disappear, that had such a finite timeline. We could approve certain elements, but there were a lot of changes that you might not have known to happen, between what we imagined and what was the runway reality. The florist, Nunko, had to do everything the day before.

“We focused on tropical plants. A lot of the bigger ferns and leaves were from my actual front yard in Miami—I trimmed them, put them in my suitcase, and the florist stored them in her freezer. It felt like home, being able to celebrate this place that I’ve come to love on the runway and knowing where the plant grows in my front yard. I can’t wait to go home this weekend and thank it for its contribution to our show.

A floral arrangement on a harness part of Chromat's Fall 2019 collection — The floral arrangement for Look 1 of Chromat’s fall 2019 fashion show

Courtesy of Becca McCharen-Tran

Model on Chromat's Fall 2019 runway — Look 1 on the runway

Victor VIRGILE

“I went to the florist at 9:30 P.M. They didn’t want me to come by until all the floral arrangements were done—it was supposed to be earlier, but it kept getting pushed back and pushed back. By the time I arrived, they had finished most of the arrangements, so I was able to just go and approve the final.”

The Calm Before the Storm

“I went home after that. I was adding friends to the invite list for the show, eating Trader Joe’s dark-chocolate-covered ginger, and watching The Bachelor over [my wife] Christine’s shoulder.

Selfie of Becca McCharenTran with a snack — McCharen-Tran the night before her show, with her snack of choice

Courtesy of Becca McCharen-Tran.

“I started The Bachelor when Rachel was the Bachelorette, and I’ve been half-heartedly watching ever since. But Christine loves it—she’s going to get so mad that I mentioned this, because it’s very much her DL interest; she just loves to turn off her brain and enjoy. I don’t like Colton. He wasn’t my favorite from Becca’s group, so I haven’t engaged with this season. I don’t know anybody’s name yet. The Bachelor as an enterprise is so reinforcing of, like, gender norms, it’s so weird.

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Chromat's Becca McCharen-Tran on Curvy Mannequins, Size Inclusivity, and That Major Nordstrom Buy

Since its first New York Fashion Week show in 2016, Chromat has been an important voice in the industry’s size-inclusivity conversation. Its casting is always notably, radically diverse, with models of all shapes and backgrounds making their way down the runway in the brand’s futuristic swimsuits, as designer Becca McCharen-Tran envisioned them.

And though shoppers could find its full size run on the brand’s e-commerce, the retailers who stocked Chromat would usually stop buying the collections at large. That all changes this summer: In March, McCharen-Tran announced that Nordstrom had made a substantial buy from her Fall 2018, including the first order for Chromat swimsuits in sizes up to 3X. This year, more and more people can become #CHROMATBABES.

“It’s major,” the designer tells Glamour at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s SCADstyle conference, where she was speaking on a panel. “Our wholesale accounts dictate what goes into production and what kind of lives and dies on the runway—basically what you’ll see once and never see again.”

Before the Nordstrom buy, there was a disconnect between what people saw at Fashion Week and what actually ended up on racks in stores. “We’ve been in Barneys for a long time and they’ve really supported us over the years, but their size ends at large,” she explains. To have a major stockist invest in its larger offerings represents something much more monumental: “Nordstrom is for sure at the forefront of size inclusivity in retail, so I do see that, finally, that consumer is getting more options in the high fashion space.”

PHOTO: Noam Galai

A model on the runway at Chromat’s Fall 2018 show.

Shortly after McCharen-Tran revealed the Nordstrom news, Refinery29 reported on behind-the-scenes images of Chromat’s swim production process (posted to the brand’s Instagram Story), including the 2X fit mannequins the team uses to make its size-inclusive swimsuits.

“People really responded to [the mannequins] and I was like, ‘I’ve seen this before!'” McCharen-Tran tells us. “That one picture of that curvy mannequin got re-posted on so many other accounts.”

The designer procured hers at Alvanon, a New York-based company that uses aggregate data including sizing and body scans to create the figure. “We’d been getting fit feedback for years from the curve models that walked for us on the runway, and other friends and fit models that we work with on our plus size patterns,” McCharen-Tran says of how she landed on the 2X shape.

Chromat - Runway - February 2018 - New York Fashion Week: The Shows

PHOTO: Noam Galai

A model on the runway at Chromat’s Fall 2018 show.

Alvanon made two mannequins for Chromat: a standard-size medium (used for measuring sizes extra small through large) and a 2X (for sizes extra large through 3X). The designer is also ensuring that the factory producing Chromat’s size-inclusive swim run understands the nuances of making a garment for different body shapes: “There [are] a lot of different little techniques, like making the straps wider for bigger sizes or adding a kind of power mesh into some places so [there’s] more compression if that’s what you want.”

The online reaction to Chromat’s mannequins highlighted another aspect of the inclusive fashion conversation that hasn’t received as much attention as, say, body-diverse runways: the lack of resources for designers who want to make their garments for a wider range of customers—mannequins, patterns, manufacturers, and so forth. And McCharen-Tran believes the access to should start with design students: “I think in the school process and educational process, those mannequins need to start there and continue.”

PHOTO: Noam Galai

A model on the runway at Chromat’s Fall 2018 show.

At the moment, fashion schools are only just starting to incorporate body forms for non-sample size garments. (“Even [on my visit] at SCAD, I didn’t seen any plus-size mannequins,” McCharen-Tran notes.) Though, the need is becoming apparent for some institutions: “I remember going to Parsons and asking about their sizes, and they are starting to add more 16’s and 18’s within the educational program to where students can kind of drape on different bodies,” she says.

With the news of the Nordstrom buy and the excitement surrounding Chromat’s curvy mannequins, McCharen-Tran hopes that perceptions of plus-size bodies will continue to evolve, along with the products available to them in stores.

“I think it’s the stigma around plus size that needs to be abolished, not the definition itself,” she says. “I think people will always need to know what size range is available no matter what you call it. Hopefully, the stigma around larger bodies in the fashion industry at large is changing. That’s what really needs to be exploded and expanded upon.”

The Savannah College of Art and Design paid for the writer’s travel and accommodations for the purpose of writing this story.

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