Jose Luis Rocha, President & CEO of J.L.Rocha Collection which will be featured during Fashion Week San Diego on Friday, Oct. 3.

Come Monday, don’t be surprised if you are casually roaming the streets of downtown and wonder if all the fashionistas were let out at once. For one, it’s fall: every fashion lover’s favorite time of year, a good enough reason to flaunt bulky sweaters, scarves, and boots. Two, from September 29 thru October 5, San Diego will be in its third year of hosting its very own fashion week.

Didn’t know we had our own runway shows, gala events and local designers? It may be time you start looking around. We may not be a fashion mecca like New York or Paris, cities that just ended their fashion week with worldwide coverage and attention, but Fashion Week San Diego with less than five years in the spotlight has already stablished a solid reputation gathering over 20,000 attendees just last year.

This year is expected to be larger by all means. The event which started as a test pilot back in 2008, didn’t fully come to fruition until 2012 building a name for itself, creating a buzz not just locally but also in nearby cities. Mayor Kevin Falcouner named Fashion Week San Diego one of the “fastest-growing events”. In a message found on FWSD’s website, he shows his full support of the economic effort the week of events stimulates for the city “as San Diego’s fashion and retail industries continue to grow, our entire city benefits, that’s a trend we can all support”. I agree.

Allison Andrews, Founder and Director of Fashion Week San Diego says that this event stands unique of others in the sense that it “takes an innovative and progressive approach to traditional fashion weeks by being open to both the fashion industry and general public. This creates a nurturing environment for our emerging designers and can help create demand by the consumer.” She adds that “Fashion Week San Diego is not just a week of runway shows, but also a whole year of events. We are a traditional fashion week that is a home for emerging designers from around the world” she states.

It’s important to highlight that among those emerging designers is a list of participating Latino talent that has been growing every year. This year there’s a number of designers that are inevitably mixing in their passion for culture into their designs.

Others gear more towards the classic look. JL Rocha is one. As CEO and head designer for the company, Mr. Rocha explains that his family has been making shoes in León, Mexico for three generations and San Diego carries the collection that caters to the USA market.

Theirs is an admirable family business that has survived the competitiveness and trending slashes of the fashion industry in a foreign country. Let’s face it, shoes are a fashion obsession in the U.S., and for a Mexican family to break through and stand its ground particularly in a border city like San Diego where consumers feel that a drive across the border gets everything priced in half is tough.

Rocha is a proud born and raised Mexican, with quite an educational combo. He attended school in Mexico, Chicago and Italy and also lived in Miami and New York. As far as his designs, he expressed “that experiencing different cultures and the knowledge of manufacturing gives me a different perspective while designing, is not just an idea but a well thought creative process base in the manufacturing of a piece.”

Mr. Rocha’s inspiration comes from well-dressed man, he believes that “whether at 17 or at 70 years old, well-dressed to me means clean, unpretentious statements of who you are through your clothing and how you carry yourself.” He describes his collection as classic designs with his personal take on colors, skins and accents.

However, putting his collection out in the market isn’t the only satisfaction for Mr. Rocha. He believes in good deeds, which is why he also launched the “Give Back Program”, a program that helps put shoes on homeless men’s feet through donations and an automatic discount for clients.

“Our program started with 10 pairs [of shoes] a month but we delivered them along with water and clean socks in downtown personally. Now, thanks to the participation of our clients and nice people dropping shoes at our Coronado boutique we get 35-40 pairs per month donated. It is important to mention that this is all thanks to people’s donations, so even if you don’t buy my products I invite you to drop your old wearable shoes in at our boutique: JL Rocha collections in Coronado.”

JL Rocha is one of many of the Latino designers whose work you get to see in this year’s Fashion Week San Diego, a participation that we are excited to see grow more each year with Latino accents from Tijuana, Los Angeles, San Diego, and background designs from Perú, Honduras among others. How can we not be excited about the designs being imported from all these varied cultures? We can’t blind ourselves to the tremendous local talent, or Latino talent. Just this month, fashion icon, Carolina Herrera was honored with the Museum at FIT’s Couture Council Award for Artistry in Fashion a week prior to New York’s fashion week–that alone is reason to celebrate Hispanic Heritage on the runway.

For more information on Fashion Week San Diego, visit www.fashionweeksd.com.

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