San Diego Style Festival Fuses Fashion and Spirits

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The August 2008 San Diego Style Festival has been canceled.

San Diego is a coastal city already blossoming on the map of trend-setting culture.

Our independent fashion industry is overflowing with innumerable mixers, runway shows, prolific photographers, and the highly anticipated Fashion Week. And now San Diego is ready for the next step: proclaiming its sense of style to the rest of the global sphere of fashion.

As our fashion sense grows and develops, so do our events. Taking us to the next level is the San Diego Style Festival, set for Saturday, August 23rd at the Embarcadero Marina Park North from 10am to 5pm, an event that fuses fashion, technology, interior design, wine and spirits, and culinary arts. It's a daylong event that will bring the best and the aspiring denizens of fashion - local and otherwise - together to create an explosion of inspiration and stimulation.

Style Festival first dug its eclectic roots in the sophisticated West Coast city of San Francisco, and now adds the fast paced buzz of Los Angeles and relaxed atmosphere of San Diego to the lineup. This dazzling event is the brainchild of the San Francisco based public relations and entertainment marketing guru, also the founder and principal player of Graffiti PR, Shaun Sanders. 2005 marked the inaugural season for the first annual San Francisco Style Festival. Over the past three years, thousands of attendees have shopped, ogled and participated in these locally produced Style Festivals. And now it's our turn.

Transforming the Embarcadero Marine Park North into a style centric village, the San Diego Style Festival plans to create an outdoor state of the art mini city glittering with avant garde fashion shows, entertaining live cooking demonstrations, music performances and more - all the trappings of an edgy fashion festival.

The vision for the Style Festival in San Diego is one that focuses on our city as a developing fashion center. As described by Sanders, the SD Style Festival aims to become a brand as dynamic as the notorious Fashion Weeks that take place all over the world, but with a nuanced twist. "We want to celebrate and honor San Diego as a major fashion style outpost, and to showcase this concept in a sexy and compelling manner," says Sanders.

While preparing his team for a successful run in San Diego, Sanders says they keep a simple mantra in mind. "Keep It Simple Stupid" (KISS) is the working principle of his team's success. Like the acronym, "The design elements will be elegant and modern yet with a sense of whimsy," says Sanders. And the rest of the event will work with the same ethic, collaborating with some of the major food purveyors in San Diego, like celebrity Chef Jean-Michel Gottleib, and Chef Brian Malarkey (Bravo's Top Chef and Executive Chef of Oceanaire).

Celebrity hair stylist Kevin Josephson will headline the beauty spectrum of the show, and a mixture of fashion runway shows, jazz music and dance performances will all be streaming live on the web. Style Festival serves up more than just tasty treats from Top Chef alumni Brian Malarkey. A variety of wines and spirits will be sampled along the sparkling Embarcadero.

These notorious Style Festivals attract educated, sophisticated, and progressive professionals. This is a culmination of our city's early adopters - those who are influencing current culture. San Diego is a city of growing entrepreneurship with much of our fashion, nightlife, dining, and boutique shopping scenes independently created. As our businesses grow, so does our reputation.

This event is backed by an unparalleled lineup, orchestrated by Graffiti PR and a selective group of local sponsors, such as DiscoverSD.com, W Hotel San Diego, San Diego Magazine, Art Rocks Radio, American Laser, San Diego Film Festival, Reaction Audio Visual, and Fashion Week San Diego.

The illustrious W Hotel will host an array of Style Festival parties atop the rooftop Beach Bar, such as the DiscoverSD.com and Style News Magazine event that will preview this year's fashion, accessories, and technology on Thursday, August 21. Other main events are the San Diego Magazine Men's Mogul Series Event at Beach Bar on Wednesday, August 20, and the San Diego Film Festival Screening Event and Cocktail Party on Friday, August 22 at a venue still to be announced.

Being the third annual event Style Festival on the California coast, Sanders says it takes a well-oiled machine to get this event off the ground. In fact, it takes "a dream, a style compass, a lot of hard work, and a strong and willing team behind me to execute the details," says Sanders. With a team so celebrated, a vision so clear, and a city so stylish, San Diego Style Festival will be nothing short of explosive.

San Diego Style Festival takes off all day Saturday, August 23 in the Embarcadero North. Admission is $10 presale and $15 day of the event. Tickets are on sale now at stylefestival.com.