Beverly Hills Fashion Festival's Curious Debut

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• Guess who showed up to hawk her handbags? It's Mischa Barton! Photo by Michael Kovac
• Classy!

We went into Beverly Hills Fashion Festival not quite sure of what to expect. We knew the event would feature runways shows from the likes of Elie Tahari (we'll bring you the photos in another post) and William Rast; and there would also be some shopping and refreshments. It all sounded pretty promising on paper.

We're not going to spend too much time snarking on the fest; what they got right, they really got right. The "made for the general public" runway shows were terrific, the event as a whole was well attended by both the fabulous and plenty of fabulous disasters, they had had frozen yogurt. The collective shopping experience failed to impress. The show was in Beverly Hills, they managed to get exclusives from megabrands Elie Tahari and William Rast and lured Skingraft's Jonny and Chris Cota, but the shopping -- which consisted of a few trinket purveyors, a designer water cooler, Gypsy05, Custo Barcelona, and Mischa Barton handbags -- seemed incongruent with the rest of the event. And don't even get us started on the Porta-Potty trailer.
· Beverly Hills Fashion Festival [Official Site]