The Pittsburgh Opera is partnering with Richard Parsakian, longtime owner of a leading vintage clothing store in Pittsburgh, to host its annual fashion show fundraiser, featuring an array of local talent.
The show, “It’s About Time,” begins at 6:30 p.m. Monday at the Bitz Opera Factory at the Pittsburgh Opera’s headquarters in the Strip District.
The show includes musical performances by the opera’s eight resident artists and fashion curated by Parsakian. He will dress 30 chosen friends from Pittsburgh’s arts community to showcase vintage clothing he has collected in his Shadyside shop — Eons Fashion Antique — over the past four decades.
The music and clothing incorporated in the opera and modeling contribute to theme of “It’s About Time.” Highlighting pieces from the past century of fashion, the show has an “Elizabethan flavor,” Parsakian said. His biggest inspiration came from the 1992 film “Orlando,” set in the Elizabethan era of the 1600s and based on the Virginia Woolf novel.
Titling the show “It’s About Time” was an easy choice. “My clothing deals with time elements and my store name, Eons, means time,” Parsakian said.
Pittsburgh Opera General Director Christopher Hahn organized the opera’s first fashion show in 2017. The inaugural event was a collaboration with his husband, the stylist Ron Booth, and their friend Karin Legato, owner of the Pittsburgh boutique Emphatics. The famous store was home to fashion from world-renowned designers from 1963 until 2013.
“The three of them got together, started the fashion show, and it was a success,” said Torrance Gricks, the opera’s manager of corporate development. “It worked well enough to do it again and now it’s become a mainstay of our fundraising events throughout the year.”
The opera typically works with a new curator or designer each year. This year is Parsakian’s second time curating the show; he was in charge of the 2022 show, “Diva Dreams and Fashion Queens.” As Hahn is retiring from the Pittsburgh Opera at the end of the season, after 25 years at the helm, he wanted to work again with someone who’s played such an important role in Pittsburgh fashion over the decades.
Parkasian said he plans to use the fashion show as an opportunity to display his long-collected “archive of fashion” one last time, as he hopes to leave behind his event-curating days.
“I’ve done these kinds of shows — and this is the most complicated one. This is the most personal one also, because I’m putting a lot of my politics into it,” Parsakian said. “I’m making a lot of my friends have visibility — my trans friends, my queer friends, my drag friends, my actor friends.”
The event will open with a cocktail hour before performances begin at 7:30 p.m. In addition to drinks and hors d’oeuvres, there is a jewelry raffle and an opportunity for the audience to stick around for festivities after the show.
“Because it’s a fundraiser and you’re paying for your ticket, we want to bulk it out a little bit,” Gricks said. “We invite [guests] up onto the runway with our DJ playing dance music for like an hour after the show, so you get to stay and keep enjoying desserts and beverages and then dance with friends.”
General admission tickets are $60 and include one drink, while student tickets are discounted at $15. Gricks noted that the fashion show typically draws a more diverse audience than other opera events, partly owing to the lower cost of admission.
“Everyone seems to be represented in the fashion showroom more than any other fundraiser we do,” Gricks said. “We see some students involved, we see our traditional operagoers and board member, and then we see the folks who are like a growing group of millennial eventgoers in Pittsburgh.”
Parsakian said the event will give audience members a chance to experience a fashion show “up close” at a “reasonable” price while giving back to the arts community.
“You see a million of these shows in New York, and they’re multimillion-dollar productions, but we can’t do that here,” Parsakian said. “What I’m trying to do is create a moment as fun as going to New York or Paris or wherever else and sitting in an exclusive front row chair next to Anna Wintour kind of thing.”
Courtney Nealon is a University of Pittsburgh student and staff writer for The Pitt News.