Vance Skerritt's fashion sense was born and bred here, but this July will mark the first time he'll see his leather designs strutting down a runway in his own borough.
Skerritt will pack up his Singer sewing machines and brightly colored swatches and move them from his mother's garage in Soundview to a 250-square-foot store in the Point, a marketplace under construction in the American Bank Note Building in Hunts Point.
A fashion statement is not all Skerritt hopes to make with his leather ensembles. He hopes his debut down a theater runway in the Point will draw out local designers and spark a home-grown fashion industry.
Bronx trends are notorious for their spreading power. Hip-hop, for example, began in black and Hispanic communities in the borough and now thrives as far away as Tokyo.
"The styles kids in the Bronx are wearing become fashionable in Kansas three weeks later," said Maria Torres, the job development director for the Point. "What we're doing is giving the creators a place to work in and teach job skills to the kids who will come here."
Skerritt teaches modeling and pattern cutting to children at the Kips Bay Boys and Girls Club in Parkchester. They call him the "leather man."
A stocky 34-year-old with a broad smile, a trim goatee and a hearty laugh, Skerritt started in fashion when he organized a college modeling club in Erie, Pa. When tailors couldn't follow his instructions for the clothes he wanted to wear in shows, he started making them himself.
After graduating from Manhattan's Fashion Institute of Technology, Skerritt said he collected his courage in 1991 and staged "All Glitter" in Brooklyn. Models wore Space Age outfits in metallic leather -- in silver, sky blue and purple -- with accordion-pleated shirts, Cossack hats, booties, cummerbunds and sashes draped across the chest.
"People loved it," Skerritt said. "The rappers came out of the woodwork for that show."
Skerritt has to leave the borough for fashion shows. "For a large range of fashion and ideas, I have to go to Sea caucus and the outlets in New Jersey," he said.
But when his store opens in the borough, the customers could be coming to him and to other Bronx designers, whom he hopes will follow his lead in bringing fashion to the borough.
But borough designers have been burned in the past. Skerritt, who is black, said he knows of few minority designers who have made it big, despite the popularity of hip-hop fashion. Instead of buying their designs, fashion companies copy them.
"What can you do about it?" Skerritt asked himself. "I can think of only one minority designer: Karl Kanai, a young New York designer who does hip-hop fashion, everything from combat boots to umbrellas."
But Skerritt is unsinkable. "What we're doing here hasn't been done before," Skerritt said. "Curiosity will get people to come here."
And when they do, Skerritt said, he hopes his fashions will be patented, not pirated.