After a four-year hiatus, Seattle’s genre-blurring collision of fashion, visual art and performance returns withImminent Mode: EVOLUTION: a one-night-only special event presented as part of ART + CULTURE WEEK on Saturday, September 26th.

Like the recent slap across Tyra Banks’ face for birthing America’s Next Top Model, Imminent Mode is back, bitch!

While those of us fortunate enough to have experienced US, Imminent Mode’s last outing, will attest, it’s gonna be tough to raise the bar much higher than the spectacle we watched unfold at ARTS at King Street Station in 2022. Is it any wonder they went on hiatus for nearly four years?

I sat down with the artist-curator trio of Adé A Cônnére, Anouk Rawkson and Jordan Christianson — three larger-than-life friends — who have managed to set their own egos aside to create an enduring, epic event. And if you think that sounds boring, think again. These divas not only make the impossible possible, they look good doing it, too.

When George Long of True Love Tattoo & Art invited Cônnére to guest curate an exhibition. Cônnére admits she didn’t really know how to put together an art show at the time, but she knew just who to call for help: Rawkson and Christianson. Together, they devised the basic premise of pairing local fashion designers with visual artists to create collaboratively. It turned out to be a big-ass concept that worked on a small scale. Based on the success of their first outing, they set out to replicate the event on a slightly larger scale.

Imminent Mode moved to Vermillion in 2015, but they were quick to realize the venue simply wasn’t big enough for the audience and runway they imagined, so the organizers did what independent artists have always done particularly well: they improvised.

“Let’s just put it on the street,” Christianson remembers.

That moment would become a defining factor in the event’s evolution. The guerrilla-style fashion show proved to be a concept that turned heads, capturing way more attention than the producers could have imagined.

The following year, Vermillion owner Diana Adams suggested that perhaps they should involve SDOT and paved the way for them to build upon their newfound success. Eventually, the block itself became part of the event. Annual editions followed in rapid succession from 2016 through 2019. Attendance expanded year over year, solidifying Imminent Mode’s reputation in both the art and fashion communities.

Plans for 2020 were derailed by the pandemic, which eventually led them to roll out the significantly larger Imminent Mode: US at ARTS at King Street Station in 2022. The larger venue, along with a sizable grant awarded by the City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, allowed them to raise the bar again. That 2022 exhibition paired artists and designers to produce sculptural garments and immersive installations. This amped up version of propelled Imminent Mode’s reputation as a serious fashion event, yet engaged public interest among Seattle creative community and art-goers.

And then the producers took four years off.

This year, the producers have found a new home at ArtLove Salon. That means activating a very different kind of environment. The 16,000-square-foot downtown arts space at 110 Union Street houses hundreds of contemporary works by Pacific Northwest artists alongside historical art and its Mechanical Marvels collection.

Rather than forcing Imminent Mode into a conventional runway, the producers intend to use the architecture within the venue to guide them.

Models will emerge from downstairs, climb ArtLove Salon’s dramatic staircase and enter the gallery above. From there, the runway will weave through the space. Music, models, garments and artworks will move through the rooms. Flashbulbs will punctuate the soundtrack. Artists and designers become part of the scene. After the runway portion concludes, models won’t simply disappear backstage; they’ll fold back into the audience and inhabit the event.

The producers are imagining something closer to a happening than a fashion show. At one point in our conversation, the group begins imagining models posed in the windows of the enclosed outdoor atrium like living mannequins while the audience looks on.

“You have to utilize the space,” Rawkson says.

It feels particularly appropriate that Imminent Mode’s latest transformation is happening during Art + Culture Week, the citywide celebration running September 19–27. Now in its third year, the festival activates eight Seattle neighborhoods with exhibitions, concerts, dance, storytelling, artist talks, film, fashion and participatory programming, with an emphasis on lowering barriers to cultural experiences and strengthening support for Seattle’s creative economy.

EVOLUTION will serve as ArtLove Salon’s final night of hosted Art + Culture Week programming. In presenting a massive interdisciplinary collaboration within a citywide initiative that encourages discovery, Imminent Mode: EVOLUTION invites audiences to become active participants in an immersive, large-scale production. That’s the sort of wild abandon the producers have honed to perfection.

Yet for all the spectacle surrounding Imminent Mode, conversations with its producers repeatedly return to something less glamorous: community.

It isn’t really a fashion show. It isn’t entirely an art exhibition. And it isn’t merely performance.

It’s an excuse to put people who might never otherwise work together into the same room, hand them a creative problem and see what new language they invent.

“We’re all creatives,” Cônnére says near the end of our conversation. “We all speak the same languages. We just use different words.”

That may be the best description of Imminent Mode yet.

The clothes have changed. The artists have changed. The venues have grown. The streets gave way to King Street Station, and now to a sprawling downtown salon. Even the way the organizers conceive of the project continues to shift.

Evolution is about building upon what came before.

It’s what happens when three friends come together and stick around long enough to reinvent an initial idea into something altogether new.