FASHION FADES, BUT STYLE IS SUSTAINABLE: The vision behind Wilmington's Summer Solstice Style Show
- Sewit Mesfen
- Jun 11
- 7 min read
I walk through the entrance of Tap Yard, a front porch with a couch, a mural climbing the wall, and yard games that dare you to stay a while, opening into a warm-toned, welcoming interior. I don't normally imbibe while conducting an interview, but the warmth of the space nudges me into a pseudo-summertime state of mind. I order a beer and notice the list of mocktails and family-friendly beverages, which includes a Capri-Sun. Calm my aluminum-pouch-loving heart.
Beer in hand, I move to greet Lily Nicole in the yard. Murals grace the walls of this downtown garden oasis and I'm immediately at ease. I learn later that Nicole's show will take place both inside and outside, so every kind of person can enjoy it at their own comfort, a detail that turns out to be very on-brand.
This isn't my first time meeting Nicole, though we had to rediscover that together. As we were texting to schedule this interview, we stumbled onto an abandoned thread. Almost two years prior, we had both attended an intimate Talib Kweli concert right here in Wilmington. The rap legend performed his classics and gave the crowd a preview of songs in the works. We had stood on opposite sides of the stage with our respective groups, both pressed against the railing up front. At some point during the show, Nicole stretched her arm out toward the stage to dap up Kweli, and he obliged. Both of them beaming. I was moved to do something I rarely do. I quickly took a picture of the two of them sharing a moment I can only describe as pure joy and energy, then tapped the stranger on the shoulder, sent it to her, and deleted it from my phone.
Now, Nicole asks me for a hug and means it. She thanks me for that picture and we both dissolve briefly into hip-hop memories. It's a fitting entry point into a conversation about community, because that's exactly what just happened.
There's a particular kind of frustration that comes from loving something and watching it fail you. For Nicole, fashion has been both a lifelong passion and a lifelong grievance, and the Summer Solstice Style Sustainability Show is her answer to both. Now in its sixth year, it's one of Wilmington's most intentional creative events. A runway show, yes, but also a statement about who gets to be seen, what gets to be called beautiful, and what the fashion industry is quietly doing to the planet while we scroll through trend cycles.
Nicole got her first professional modeling check at 14, working boutique shows in Virginia Beach. Fashion, she says, felt like art from the beginning. "The way you assemble an outfit is the way a painter chooses colors. I think everybody who intentionally gets up and gets dressed in the morning is rocking art. You're choosing clothing, you pick something that is your artistic taste, and then how you mash your outfits together, that's your artistic expression."
That instinct for world-building runs deeper than the runway. Nicole came to Wilmington in 2012 to study theater and English at UNCW, after her mother offered a piece of advice that changed the course of her life. Whatever you're doing when you're wasting time is what you should be pursuing. Nicole was skipping nursing lectures to rehearse for student plays. She changed her major that same day. She chose UNCW specifically because its professors weren't just teachers. They were working artists, actively making films and writing books while they taught. "I wanted to know the world you could create," she says. She graduated in 2015 and landed a job as a technical theater director at Thalian Hall, one of the one percent of art majors who actually work in their field. She's been building worlds on stages ever since, just not always the kind with a proscenium.
But the more she moved through the fashion industry, the more the mirror cracked. When she began working with local boutiques and pop-up runway events, the pattern was unmistakable. Very tall, very thin, very blonde, with maybe one or two "ethnoambiguous" women, a handful of men if lucky.
"The standard beauty look was just the same, and it's very representative of the fashion world in America, and it made me nauseous."
She started pulling out of those shows. Eventually, she stopped being invited. "I was like, that's fine. I honestly don't want to be in that crowd anyway, because it's not representative of the actual community."
The Summer Solstice Style Sustainability Show was born from that gap, the distance between who fashion celebrates and who actually lives in a community like Wilmington, where Black residents make up a significant portion of the population but are largely absent from local fashion spaces.
Nicole's model recruitment is, in her own words, "very intentional about minorities." Over six years, the show's runway has featured Native Americans proudly wearing tribal regalia alongside modern dress, first-generation African immigrants, alternative and goth aesthetics, plus-size bodies, natural hair, and a full range of gender expressions. She's had people in their 60s and 70s walk the runway for the first time in their lives. She's featured drag-designed looks on non-drag performers, wheelchair users, and transgender models. This year, for the first time, she has a full children's line, a designer hand-making seven outfits from found and recycled fabrics, because as Nicole puts it, kids deserve to be on the runway too.
"I'm 100% making a guaranteed spot for anyone who can check the box of other."
That includes vendors, queer crafters, minority-owned small businesses, upcycle and rethrift brands. "Maybe you're a single female and you're a crafter, bam, you got a vendor space." The photographers she recruits are intentionally women, femme-identifying, or LGBTQ+, a deliberate choice rooted in the industry's documented history of exploitation. "My models should not have to worry about that when they're coming to have fun," she says simply.
Her eye for who gets excluded didn't develop in a vacuum. In 2020, Nicole was among the organizers of local protest activity, navigating the full weight of that moment, including a media that she felt consistently misrepresented the movement's intentions and imagery. "They were painting us as horrible rioters, and anything negative the world was saying in 2020 came across our table," she recalls. Eventually, organizers shut press out of their planning circles entirely.
That experience sharpened something she already knew. Naysayers talk, but they don't show up. And the people who matter will find you.
"I always believe that the people show up in the rooms or the spaces that they're supposed to be at."
If someone posts a boycott on Reddit, someone else reads it, gets curious, and comes to the show.
The show's full name announces its other preoccupation, the environmental cost of the clothing industry. This isn't incidental. It's central.
"Fashion is literally killing our world. There are more clothes on this planet right now than we're going to need in the next six decades, but we're still churning out more."
When she sees images of fast-fashion waste mountains in developing nations, she says plainly: "I cry." The clothes are often already destroyed by weather before anyone can salvage them. "That kills me, because why are we making more if we're throwing away so much?"
The show answers that question by platforming upcycle designers, vintage rethrift brands, and repurposed fashion, making sustainability part of how the event introduces itself to audiences. Her tagline carries the whole philosophy in a single line. Fashion fades, but style is sustainable.
The distinction matters to her. Fashion is what the industry tells you is cool this season. Style is what you do with what you've got, how you put pieces together in a way that's distinctly yours. "Nobody can take your style," she says. "They can take your clothing, but in the soul of it, your style is your style."
One show has captured Nicole's imagination for years, and she lights up talking about it. Trash'n Fash'n is a youth-led fashion event where the clothes are made entirely from found objects and literal garbage. Nicole first encountered this concept as a college student, when she participated in a student-led fashion show where her outfits were constructed from burlap bags, paper bags, and salvaged police tape. "I was legit wearing garbage," she says, still delighted by it. "I saw them taking out the trash can, and my mind was just so amazed."
She's watched Trash'n Fash'n designers craft looks from six-pack beer can rings and mesh fishing nets. One year, someone made a full dress from fishing net. "When I tell you it was a whole Little Mermaid flashback," she laughs. The designers range wildly in age, from high schoolers to, in one year, an 82-year-old, and Nicole sees in them exactly the untapped potential the fashion industry routinely ignores.
"Some of them are like high schoolers. It's such a hodgepodge of ages, but there's untapped potential. I just want someone to be like, heck yeah, you're on the right lane, kid."
The scheduling has never quite aligned, but connecting the two shows remains a dream. She's already made the offer. If Trash'n Fash'n wants a line in her show, as opener, as closer, whatever works, she'll give it to them. "I will literally put them in as the closer," she says. "I just want to preview what they can do."
Nicole organizes the show entirely herself, recruiting models, designers, photographers, and a live DJ, while also serving as emcee. The model pool started with friends she called in from her community ("hey homies, homegirls, homebodies, who wants to walk in my show") and has grown year over year through word of mouth. Designers are sourced the same way, going to local vintage markets, having conversations, finding people doing the work quietly and giving them a stage. The whole operation runs on volunteer labor. No one has ever been paid. "The show is as successful as it is because of community support," she says. "People stepping up in the lane they can operate in and willingly giving their time freely."
Nicole hasn't walked a runway herself in four or five years. She made a choice, the way anyone in activism eventually has to, between a paycheck and alignment.
"You take stock of your morals versus a paycheck. I could go walk a show, get some really dope photos, but then I'm aligning with something I genuinely don't believe in."
So instead, she built the show she wanted to see.
The Summer Solstice Style Sustainability Show takes place June 21 at Tap Yard. It falls on Father's Day. She's already got a response ready for anyone who brings that up: Give Dad the day off, and come see what fashion looks like when it actually looks like everyone. For tickets visit Eventbrite: Summer Solstice Style Show .
All proceeds go to support the lowercase leaders and Sokoto House for continued community work and violence prevention.
For more information about the show, visit @summersolsticeshow.ilm on Instagram.
