Get Seen » At the Emerging Trends Fashion Show at the BCA Cyclorama

At the Emerging Trends,  an event that showcases burgeoning and yet-undiscovered talent during Boston Fashion Week each year, an eclectic crowd mixed, mingled, and guzzled free Vitamin Water, browsing the vendor stands around the runway and waiting for the 11-designer show to begin. Miss New Hampshire posed for photos, her crown glittering, while sleek young girls in stilettos air-kissed friends, hip urbanites with streaked hair and studded leather chatted quietly, suburban-mom types in their Saturday-night finest clucked over accessories tables, and starch-shirted college-age dudes and their girlfriends vamped for photo ops at the pop-up red-carpet area. A small army of black-clad photogs darted about, snapping pictures of anyone who might be of interest. That seemed to include everyone that night, and that was exactly the point. 

Tess Aquarium, designer/costumer and fashion adviser at NuVu Studio

The instant Tess's aquamarine steez caught our eye, we had just one word for her: seapunk? "That's kind of a mixture of  '90s-retro punk rock, but with barnacles instead of studs," she said. "Some people say my look is seapunk, but I think it's more mermaid."

A San Francisco native, Tess recommends fashion scavenging in the Mission, should you ever wind up in her 'hood. Here, she scours secondhand spots like the Garment District, Urban Renewals, and Goodwill, the source for her whole outfit - except for the awesomely zany shoes, which she snagged at Boomerangs.

This member of the Vermin Street experimental arts collective wasn't always so fashion-forward. "In my early 20s I went through a very conservative phase, where I divorced myself from my weirdo past and wore a lot of bad slacks," she admitted. "A lot of slacks. I don't know what was wrong with me!"

For more photos of this party, go to thephoenix.com/parties.