Fashion Focus Chicago 2010. Dress Code 2010: Off The Grid

The Dress Code stage featuring Seth Mayerink-Griffin from SAIC

One of the main highlights of each year's Fashion Focus Chicago is the Thursday night show, Dress Code. The stage is set exclusively for students, the next generation of design talent and innovation hailing from four of the city's premiere art and design institutions: School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Columbia College Chicago, The Illinois Institute of Art-Chicago (IIAC) and The International Academy of Design and Technology (IADT).This year's Dress Code theme was entitled 'Off the Grid', which allowed plenty of room for the student designers to express themselves in an out-of-box kind of way.

The show is typically a crowd favorite since the audience at Dress Code is treated to a spectacle of color, texture and fabric as the artful, the avant-garde and the sometimes experimental visions of the students come down the runway. But whether the pieces are wearable or walking works of art, the Dress Code show always does its part in allowing us a peek into the future of fashion.