Born in the Mott Haven neighborhood in the South Bronx, Flora Montes grew up in the Mill Brook Houses, a part of the New York City Housing Authority that provides public housing in the city.
Raised by a teenage mother and a father who was an addict, Montes says her childhood was far from stellar. She left the borough with her two-year-old son in 1989 and moved to Connecticut. However, tragedy struck Montes after a pregnancy in her mid-30s. In 2001, her daughter died at birth, passing away in Montes’ arms. The terrible fallout from this heartbreak would eventually bring her back to the South Bronx.
“I wanted to make sense of my life and make sense of why this tragedy happened to me,” Montes, 57, says. “How do I have this little girl’s legacy remembered and how do I make my legacy remembered?”
Striving to pay it forward, Montes spent countless days stuffing all kinds of school supplies she bought herself — everything from pens to notebooks — into her jalopy of a car and driving around to hand them out to students in the South Bronx. She partnered with a local shelter and the Bronx Museum of the Arts to distribute the supplies. At the time, she also attempted to create a name for herself by starting a catering business for companies.
In 2012, Montes got a gig catering a Manhattan event for Latin Fashion Week, an organization with year-round events promoting Latin apparel and professionals. As she served food for attendees, Montes’ eyes began to lock in on the runway, the models and the clothing designs.
“I fell in love,” Montes exclaims.
She wondered why the Bronx didn’t have a similar event — so she set out to make one happen.
“[The fashion industry] wasn’t as inclusive as it should have been at that time,” she said. “I heard a lot of stories from models that were rejected because of their hair. Because it was curly. Bronx Fashion Week’s mission for me at that time was instant.”
In 2014, Montes created an organization she coined Bronx Fashion NYC, which became a 501(c) 3 nonprofit in 2020. The organization aimed to establish Bronx-centric fashion event opportunities and better representation in an industry where access is often unattainable for people of color or of limited means — or who happen to come from the Bronx, a borough often perceived by some as un-chic despite boasting a culturally thriving history of innovation in the arts.
In the beginning, Montes faced several challenges with financing the sort of fashion shows she knew her home borough was capable of. She often had to work another day job to bring in the money to fund them. But through constant sponsorship presentations, she began to gain a steady flow of sponsors. The first group to sign on was Metro Optics Eyewear, and more recent contributors include the Fordham Road Business Improvement District and The Mall at Bay Plaza. With this influx of financial support, Bronx Fashion NYC has been able to host shows across different venues in the borough, including at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New York Botanical Garden and the Bronx Library Center.
Over the course of eight years, the nonprofit has also grown in staffing. Haizel McIntyre, a first-generation Dominican-American raised in the South Bronx who modeled throughout college, restarted her modeling career in 2018 with the help of the organization in 2018. It wasn’t long before Montes asked McIntyre, now 42, to take on the role of creative producer, which entails hiring a progressive, diverse group of models and clothing creators to help expand the industry’s long-standing limitations. McIntyre handles operational items like registration, designer and model agreements and scouting for designers for the shows.
In addition, Montes called on Crystal Gomez, who started modeling for Bronx Fashion NYC in 2015, to join her team. A Bronx-born person of Puerto Rican heritage, Gomez, 38, soon moved up the ranks from assistant creative director to creative director. She is currently responsible for the aesthetic of the productions, making final decisions on makeup, hairstyles, music and order of the show. She also manages rehearsals, fittings and connecting with designers to fuse their creativity into the show.
From scouring for models at casting calls to obtaining sponsors, finding fashion designers, booking venues and hosting training sessions before the shows, the process, Montes says, takes six months to a year to create each show.
In addition to all the work of putting on these shows, Montes has lately focused on another longtime dream: to create a fashion school designed for adolescents.
She collaborated with Here to Here, a nonprofit in the Bronx developing career pathways for the youth, to create the program at the South Bronx Community Charter High School. The hands-on program let the students, like 16-year-old Verman Cuello, become a part of the Bronx Fashion Week’s February 2023 show. From assisting at casting calls to providing backstage help, the students saw firsthand what it is like to put together a show.
Cuello envisioned himself as a surgeon. However, after joining the fashion program, an opportunity he was never afforded, he is pondering a potential career shift as a designer or stylist. He now knows he can earn a spot in the industry as a person of color through learning about diverse fashion trailblazers, such as model Tyson Beckford, who hails from the Bronx.
During the launch of the program, Montes enlisted the help of 31-year-old Delsio Hilario, a South Bronx native and Bronx Fashion NYC model.
Speaking to students, Hilario says, “I wish that I had a program like this when I was younger because this would keep me out of the streets.”
Hilario, who spent some time in the Bronx’s foster care system, soon moved to Connecticut and got into trouble. After committing a robbery, Hilario faced 18 months behind bars as a 17-year-old. After his release, he found a job but quickly lost it and resorted to the one place he knew he could make money — the streets. He committed another robbery and served a six-year sentence at 20 years old.
Upon his release, he recalled a conversation with his aunt about modeling, and quickly she brought up Montes. Soon, Hilario found himself at a casting call. Self-doubt set in for the newcomer as he never imagined walking a runway. Despite the nerves, he secured a spot in the fashion show and walked at their Westchester Square production in the Bronx.
“Bronx Fashion changed [my life] in probably one of the best ways possible,” Hilario says. “It kept me out of things that I wasn’t supposed to do. It kept me busy.”
“[Flora] always pushed me to be great,” he adds. “It’s a great feeling to have somebody behind you, to always encourage you to be good. I’m forever grateful to Flora for believing in me and pushing me.”
The doors of opportunity began opening for Hilario shortly after his first show. He walked in the Australian fashion brand Coogi’s 50th-anniversary show, a Franklin Road International fashion show and continued walking for Bronx Fashion NYC. He credited his success to Montes and her organization.
For Montes, models like Hilario have become family.
“I may have lost a daughter,” Montes says, “But I gained models. They may not even realize how proud I am of them, and that they’ve become my children. … When I look at all the stories that have come through us – we are more than fabric. We’re more than a runway. There’s a story beyond that runway every time.”
Bronx Fashion NYC takes a Bronx mall by storm
When people hear the term “New York Fashion Week,” they typically think of breathlessly hyped, mega-photographed events unfolding mainly in Manhattan and Brooklyn. But Bronx Fashion NYC is striving to change that perception decisively. Case in point: The organization’s Bronx fall 2022 event unspooled against a backdrop of much more aggressively promoted shows in Manhattan. Why the disparity? Because as far as New York’s “official” fashion week is concerned, the Bronx barely exists.
Officially, New York Fashion Week in fall 2022 ran from Sept. 9-14. It was spearheaded by The Council of Fashion Designers of America, Inc. (CFDA), a not-for-profit trade association. CFDA owns and organizes the Fashion Calendar and the official New York Fashion Week schedule. It implements a formal application for designers to be included in the official schedule. And for the fall 2022 lineup, all kinds of interesting work appeared.
But for Flora Montes and her band of guerilla innovators, the epicenter of Fashion Week wasn’t at any of these high-profile locales. It was in a string of events branded under the umbrella name Bronx Fashion Week, or, as they abbreviate it, BXFW. The first major event this past fall would unfold not in a swanky convention center or an architectural landmark, but at a modest mall located at 200 Baychester Ave. in Co-op City.
The date is Sept. 10. The sound of an upbeat playlist of techno and instrumental music has begun to ripple throughout the Mall at Bay Plaza. Atop the third floor, the mall’s food court beckons, completely transformed where rows of orange chairs have been lined up, and spotlights gleam on the white backdrop and runway.
In short order, the two-hour show in the mall food court will become a standing-room-only space. Anxiously waiting in the back is model and Bronx native Alana Sierra. Wearing an off-the-shoulder ruffled cheetah print blouse paired with a black leather skirt and patent leather heels, she takes a deep breath and hits the runway. As she struts across the catwalk, the plus-size model takes in the applause and achieves something she never thought would be possible.
A report conducted by the website The Fashion Spot in 2014 analyzed 151 fashion shows, including New York, London, Milan and Paris. It found that 82% of the models cast for those shows were white, with Black and Asian models totaling only 6.8% of the cast and Latinas at a wildly marginalized 1.8%. A 2022 study revealed a somewhat better balance: 48.6% of models were people of color, and there was an increase in plus-size and gender representation — yet there was also a drop in age representation.
But really, Sierra doesn’t need to hear a bunch of facts and figures like these to know how hard-won improvements in fashion diversity have been.
“When I was growing up nobody looked like me,” Sierra shares. “I am not the typical model. So it feels really great that [I am] accepted in a place where they will accept me back.
“It’s very exciting not only for myself but for the community. I have little girls looking up to me. I want girls and women alike to know that we can rock it and you can do it.”
As bigger fashion shows were unraveling across Manhattan throughout that mid-September week in 2022, Sierra says it was surreal to be a part of a fashion event in a place she calls home. She felt that there was a misconception that fashion is primarily a Manhattan or Brooklyn activity, after witnessing little to no fashion shows in her borough.
“Fashion is everywhere,” she says walking off the runway. “It’s really exciting to have the [Bronx] community feel that you don’t have to go to the city to be a part of fashion. You can be in it — in your own backyard.”
Sierra and many others have found the BXFW shows to be a showcase for diversity of models with regard to age, race and background. Folks from newcomers to experienced models have found opportunities at these events.
One of these newcomers, 16-year-old Sayeira McIntyre, was dressed in a beige dress and an orange plaid button-up with her natural hair out. Sayeira is approaching a momentous occasion: her first time hitting the runway — something she’d previously thought of as unimaginable.
Why? Because she has encountered so much misunderstanding of, and so little representation of, the Bronx in the fashion world. For this 5’4″ model, she believed the industry was not built for her. Her ideas of models usually involved them being taller than her. But once she sat in on a casting call with her mother Haizel McIntyre — the creative producer for the organization and former child model — Sayeira could finally envision a path for herself.
“I want to show … you don’t have to look a certain way to be a model — you can just do it,” Sayeira says.
And for Sayeira, “just doing it” meant multiple tries and failures to make it to her mall-show debut. Finally, after her third casting call — she made the show.
“I’m really a proud mom,” her mother Haizel shared before Sayeira made her debut. “It’s kind of a bit nostalgic for me to think back to when I modeled at her age.”
Haizel is careful to confirm that she actually had no involvement in the decision of casting her daughter and stepped out of the selection process. As she puts it, “it’s kind of a culminating experience for me to see that she might continue to do what I had a passion for.”
Sayeira later said that as she walked the runway multiple times, embodying a self-described “baddie” persona on the catwalk, she received words of encouragement and advice from newcomers to more experienced models. In the waiting room, she recalled constant reassurance and an uplifting attitude from many young and older male and female models awaiting their turn to strut their skills, including Gaby Haas. In a pool of young talent, Haas is an anomaly within an industry where the median age of is 23, according to the Fashion Model Directory in 2019.
Growing up in Romania, Haas, now 60, had always wanted to be a model. She loved playing dress up as a kid, often wearing her sister’s high heels. She remembers her mother telling her not to leave the house without putting on makeup or doing her hair.
But her height in the past had prevented her from becoming a runway model. In Europe, Haas suffered rejection after rejection for her short stature. She resorted to being a fitness model and taking up dance. She continued as a personal trainer when she first moved to the U.S. in 2005, and now as a food and nutrition supervisor at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey. However, with shows like Bronx Fashion Week — her dreams are now a reality.
Haas discovered the Bronx Fashion Week casting call on Facebook and Instagram. Haas says she often does not have high expectations of being selected in a sea of tall and younger models, but that does not deter her from heading to every casting call she sees. Following her tryout, Montes , the founder, praised Haas’ look, how wonderful she was and how she wanted her in the show. She added that Montes’ words made her day.
“It doesn’t matter what age you are, you have to be proud [of] where you are and inspire other women,” Haas declares. “That’s my goal in life, to inspire many women — don’t be afraid to show how you look, put on makeup, put [on] a short dress, put [on] something sexy. And just step outside of your comfort zone. ”
Seeing models of all kinds — young, older, plus-size, male, female, gender-neutral — is exactly what Montes loves to see from her usual front-row seat at BXFW shows. She’s seeing her vision brought to life, one runway walk at a time.
A runway open to everyone and anyone
Bronx Fashion NYC continues to grow as an organization — and within this past season, the fashion shows themselves got bigger and bigger. Their Sept. 17, 2022 show was at a place like no other — an elaborate public library, bringing the community of fashion to a community-centered space. This was a first for BXFW, as most of the previous shows have happened at the Bay Plaza Mall.
Harlem-born designer Sofia Davis loved the Bronx Library Center as the show’s new location. The $50 million, 78,000-square-foot library is located at East Kingsbridge Road, a busy intersection filled with Bronx residents and local shops. She thought it was important to have a space that reached the community.
Davis, 57, showcased her House of Sofia Couture collection. Some may know the fashion media conglomerate as “the Black Anna Wintour and the First Lady of Fashion,” as stated on her website. Her designs have brought haute couture decked out with feathers, bling and flowingness to the Bronx. Davis has been collaborating with BXFW since it was a twinkle in Montes’ eye. Montes would come to Davis’ office to discuss, what was at the time, her preliminary ideas for BXFW.
Fashion has been a part of Davis’ life since she played in her mom’s lipstick and Chanel №5 perfume as a 4 year old. She soon studied fashion design at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Now, Davis is in all facets of fashion with her two collections — House of Sofia Couture and BODY GODDESS, a sunglasses collection, and Fashion Avenue News magazine, among other projects.
Similar to Montes, Davis did the same thing with her own model management company, creating the organization to address the lack and need for diversity and inclusion in the fashion industry. She had long noticed that top publications like “W,” “Vogue” and “Harper’s Bazaar” had no black models at all until Naomi Campbell came along, and precious few even after that.
“I think that it’s imperative that people see themselves on a runway,” Davis says. “Everyone is not 5 ’11″ and 110 pounds … that is not realistic.”
Davis continued creating space for overlooked people with a series of shows called “Fashion on the Hudson.” She says she likes to recall something her father often said: Don’t beg to be part of anything, “take the whole table.” That’s more or less what she has done.
“I think that it is important that everybody is represented,” Davis says. “I thank Bronx Fashion Week for not only doing that, making everyone feel included, but [for] doing it from the beginning. Not waiting for George Floyd or something that happened to say, ‘Okay, we are going to include everybody.’”
Beyond the boost it’s going to give Davis to sell clothes, BXFW’s Sept. 17, 2022 library fashion show also marked a heart-tugging occasion for one model in particular, and his family.
In the front row of the library’s auditorium sits Diane Fenner, her daughter and her granddaughter, all waiting to watch Diane’s son, Joel Fenner, glide through the runway, taking advantage of that platform. He finally comes out decked in a two-piece blue suit with gold accents from Larry Franco’s Spring 2022 designs.
Joel’s 5-year-old niece sits on the edge of her seat with an iPad in one hand and the other hand waving in excitement — the beginnings of inspiration clearly sparking in her. Joel’s mother can’t contain her parental pride as she watches her son represent their culture. She hopes his presence can inspire more male models to walk for BXFW.
“Just to be here, and to represent African Americans and males in fashion, it’s really an honor,” Diane says.
Joel, 17, clearly felt that love from his family. They have always supported him and had his back, he says. Aside from his family making this an amazing experience, gaining new connections with fellow models added to it.
Bronx Fashion Week is its own little community, embodying a family-like environment at each show, Davis says, echoing Joel’s sentiment.
Bronx Fashion NYC has always been more than just fashion and modeling for Montes, it’s about the opportunities it’s fostering in the Bronx and the creativity it’s nurturing. With Bronx Fashion NYC, Montes is working on putting Bronx models and local designers on the map, paving the way for the future.
“I’m building a legacy,” Montes says. “This isn’t a company. We were always meant to be more than just an event.”
Reach Nicholas Hernandez at hernandezn714@gmail.com. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes
