THE STORY
The Story: Bridging Chicago’s Fashion Gap
A Larger Mission
Tony Long, founder of FashionBar LLC and designer behind IAMTONYLONG, has built his work around a larger mission: helping position Chicago as a serious fashion destination.
Through FashionBar Chicago, Tony’s work connects fashion, business, runway production, retail access, education, and community. But this mission is part of a much larger Chicago fashion story — one shaped by talent, momentum, missed continuity, and the ongoing effort to give Chicago fashion the foundation, structure, consistency, and visibility it deserves.
Chicago has never lacked designers, models, stylists, photographers, educators, students, sewers, pattern marketing, small quantity manufactures, retailers, creators, influencers, and community. What the city has often needed is a stronger system to connect that talent into one consistent public-facing global fashion identity.
For Tony, fashion is not only about creating garments or producing runway moments. It is about building a pathway where designers can learn, develop, present, sell, and grow into a B2C and B2B environment for profit. That belief is where the story of FashionBar, and Chicago’s larger fashion future begins.
A city searching for fashion identity
Chicago Fashion Focus (CFW) was first established in 2005 under former Mayor Richard M. Daley ran as a citywide fashion initiative from that year until 2015, when the city ended its 10-year effort to support local fashion initiatives. The program was a collaboration between the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events and the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), featuring runway shows, shopping events, and industry programs and it later rebranded and relaunched in 2014 as Chicago Fashion Week, however did not materialize yearly as planned due to lack of funding, sponsorship and/or national industry interest in Chicago as an emerging fashion destination.
In 2008, under Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago had another important fashion structure: the Chicago Fashion Incubator at Macy’s on State Street. The incubator played a different role in establishing a central location in downtown Chicago for fashion creatives to incubate their design business and grow their brands. It was yet another fundamental component for a citywide fashion industry. Its purpose was designer development. The Chicago Fashion Incubator gave emerging designers access to workspace, mentorship, business education, professional support, and resources that helped them understand fashion as a business. That work was important because designers need more than inspiration. They need pricing knowledge, production planning, customer understanding, mentorship, workspace, and guidance on how to move from creative work into a sustainable brand.
The incubator helped strengthen the business side of Chicago fashion, but it was not the same as giving the city a lasting public fashion week.
– A fashion incubator helps designers grow.
– A fashion week helps the public see them.
Chicago needed both.
With a strong local focus as a fashion city, major retail activations, public fashion events, and city-supported programming. Marshall Field’s on State Street became part of that early momentum, helping show that fashion could live at the center of the city and capture public attention on a major scale for the catalog and department store Era where Spiegels, Marshall Field’s, and Macy’s were the epicenter of Chicago fashion. However, there was minimal to no demand for apparel garments created by Chicago fashion designers.
Support Without a Public Runway Calendar
Fashion Focus Chicago is a city-backed initiative created to spotlight local designers and support the city’s fashion community. Fashion Focus helped give Chicago designers visibility, but it also revealed a larger issue: Chicago had fashion programming, but it was not driven by seasonality, nor a national or global vision to establish a true lifestyle identity stemming from the great city of Chicago. Fashion Focus was Chicago’s fashion week, presented at Millennium Park yearly in September.
Fashion Focus, according to Melissa Gamble, former director of fashion for the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, the Chicago Fashion Week name was tied to intellectual property and trademark ownership by another party, which affected how the city branded its fashion programming (Lipinski, 2024).
That distinction matters. Chicago had the designers. It had the audience. It had programming and the manufacturing infrastructure. But the city did not have one clear national or global objective. Tony Long believed in a consistent Chicago Fashion Week platform that celebrated creativity, design, and national/global market opportunity for garment creation and manufacturing, carrying the industry forward in the way other major fashion cities are known for their seasonal fashion calendars that drove the industry and takes designer brands to market aiding Chicago to claim its identity with emerging fashion marketing/capitals such as Phoenix, Kansas etc. Chicago Fashion Week can assist the City of Chicago and stabilize the Chicago fashion industry as the Midwest fashion capital bridging NYC to Los Angeles.
When the Structure Shifted
In 2016, Chicago’s fashion structure changed significantly. Fashion Focus Chicago, the city-supported fashion initiative that included September fashion programming, was defunded. With those budget cuts, the city’s Fashion Director role was also eliminated and she resumed her career as the Director of Macy’s Fashion Incubator.
Tony worked with Macy’s Fashion Incubator and planned and executed student tours of the space at Macy’s to help drive the incubator opportunities designers needed to grow their lifestyle brands.
These events created a gap in Chicago’s fashion ecosystem: the city still had a desire for a fashion future with a collective group of creative talent, but the formal structure that helped organize public fashion visibility had shifted.
In 2018, Tony and this FashionBar team documented a white paper highlighting the Financial and Economic IMPACT to CHICAGO if an established a seasonal calendar of runway programming, education seminars, business development of position Chicago as a city of fashion, beauty and wellness, combating homicide, crime and corruption.
During this time, Tony worked with folks from the City of Chicago’s Mayor’s Office, World Business Chicago, Illinois Department of Tourism, Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and a few other organizations to revitalize the Chicago fashion industry.
World Business Chicago hosted a presentation with key fashion industry businesses from education, non-profits, and for-profit organizations to share the learnings from the documented white paper and this presentation. Tony then met with the City of Chicago and presented his white paper findings with a team of Los Angeles consultants and the work continued…
Showing consistency and execution from 2016 to 2024, FashionBar helped drive this revenue model, gaining attention, building Chicago into the Midwest fashion capital, and driving the Chicago fashion industry. During this period, DCASE promoted FashionBar’s runway shows and fashion events, helping connect independent fashion programming to the broader cultural calendar of the city from 2016 to present day. With over 900 runway shows and a history of disruption, FashionBar LLC continues to celebrate innovation, design, and Chicago’s fashion identity with inclusion, diversity, and culture.
Over time, other parts of Chicago’s fashion infrastructure also evolved. Major department-store fashion spectacles became less central. The Chicago Fashion Incubator continued its work for years, but, in 2023, it transitioned away from its physical Designer-in-Residence model and moved its mission into a new speaker series and educational partnership with Columbia College Chicago (Columbia College Chicago, 2023).
That transition preserved part of the incubator’s legacy, but it also marked a shift in Chicago’s fashion infrastructure. The city still had talent, but it had less centralized visibility. It still had designers, but fewer consistent public-facing platforms. It still had education, but less connection between fashion-week visibility, designer development, retail opportunity, and customer access.
In 2024, Chicago Fashion Week was publicly reintroduced as a citywide event with mayoral support. Reports described a 12-day fashion week with more than 50 events across Chicago, including runway shows, marketplaces, award ceremonies, educational programs, and public-facing experiences (Jordan, 2024; Yee, 2024).
That renewed attention was important for the city, but it did not appear out of nowhere. It followed years of work from designers, educators, organizers, retailers, models, stylists, photographers, independent platforms, and organizations that continued building fashion visibility even when Chicago lacked a consistent fashion-week structure
Bridging the Gap
When a city does not have one continuous fashion week structure, independent platforms become essential. They are the ones producing shows, building audiences, supporting designers, training models, creating pop-ups, organizing marketplaces, connecting brands to customers, and keeping local fashion visible.
FashionBar Chicago became part of that bridge.
After Fashion Focus Chicago was defunded in 2016, FashionBar continued building seasonal fashion programming in Chicago. Tony Long engaged with DCASE and continued positioning FashionBar as a platform that could help fill the gap between designer development, public runway visibility, and business opportunity. FashionBar’s consistent April and October events helped maintain a recurring fashion calendar for Chicago designers during a period when the city no longer had the same centralized public fashion-week structure.
Before Chicago Fashion Week was publicly reintroduced as a citywide event in 2024, FashionBar was already producing fashion-week-style runway programming in Chicago. In 2023, ABC7 Chicago covered “Chicago Fashion Week, powered by FashionBar LLC,” also known as “The Shows,” at Water Tower Place on the Magnificent Mile (Meadors, 2023). Event listings from that period also described Chicago Fashion Week powered by FashionBar LLC: The Shows as a multi-day runway and marketplace experience at Water Tower Place (FashionBar, LLC, 2023).
FashionBar’s role is to bridge the space between designer development and public fashion visibility. Through FashionBar: The Shows, The Showroom, The Shops, business consulting, design development, education, model training, pop-ups, and community-centered events, FashionBar continues connecting runway with business, creativity with structure, and Chicago fashion talent with real opportunities.
Chicago does not lack creativity.
It needs connection, visibility, and continuity.
FashionBar Chicago is helping build that bridge.
References
Chicago Fashion Incubator. (n.d.). Chicago Fashion Incubator.
Columbia College Chicago. (2023, December 11). Columbia and the Chicago Fashion Incubator announce a new partnership.
FashionBar, LLC. (2023). Chicago Fashion Week powered by FashionBar LLC: The Shows. Rebelity.
Jordan, C. (2024, May 29). Sew exciting! Chicago Fashion Week will debut this fall. Chicago Star Media.
Lipinski, G. (2024, October 9). Chicago’s first fashion week kicks off. The Columbia Chronicle.
Meadors, R. (2023, October 14). Chicago Fashionbar Week celebrates beauty, fashion and diversity on Magnificent Mile. ABC7 Chicago.
Yee, A. (2024, May 28). Chicago Fashion Week will turn the city “into a runway” this fall. Chicago Sun-Times.
More Citations:
Chronicle Media — September 28, 2015 –
by Isa Giallorenzo | September 29, 2015
Friday, November 13th, 2025 https://chicagolooks.blogspot.com/2015/11/interview-with-dcase-director-tonya.html
By StyleChicago.com – August 20, 2016
City Pulled the plug: