One fashionable happening

Dave Brooks

After weeks of scrambling to tie up loose ends, Jeana Cason found

herself facing a place she hadn’t been in years.

With lights flashing and music blaring, she and seven other models

strutted their stuff down the narrow fashion runway to showcase a

first-of-its-kind exposition for designer Minerva Gonzalez Sanchez

and her line of clothing NuNu Galleries.

With each piece of clothing hand-sewn and hand-painted, Sanchez

leaves little doubt about the highly individualized line of clothing

she unapologetically regards in the same vain as high art.

Monday night, that high art mixed with an all-volunteer crew,

staffed with managers and hotel staff like Delia Cruz and Missy

Harris from the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort & Spa and other

local businesses working as makeup artists, hair stylists and even

models, for the late night show at Sutra Lounge in Costa Mesa.

Cason, owner of high-end jewelry store L’ZEV, helped coordinate a

lot of the personnel at the fashion show, but late Monday, her mind

was strictly runway.

“I’m so nervous, I haven’t done this in 15 years,” she confessed

as she sprinted around trying to get ready for the show.

A model in high school, Cason said her career came to a halt when

she got married at a young age and decided to start a jewelry service

center with her husband in Huntington Beach.

When her marriage ended, she said she went through a brief period

of depression, only to bounce back after crafting a deal with Hyatt

owner Steve Bone to open her own jewelry boutique at the hotel.

“Now I’m facing something new again,” Carson said. “Participating

in this fashion show with Minerva has really boosted my self-esteem.

I believe in myself.

“This has given me confidence.”

Cason’s tale of self-renewal is fitting for a NuNu galleries show.

Sanchez herself is living on second chances, a cancer survivor who

says her family of 12 siblings and her faith in God is the reason she

is able to showcase her clothing today.

In 1991 at the age of 21, Sanchez was diagnosed with lymphoma, and

it nearly took her life. Just four years later, she was diagnosed

with acute lymphatic leukemia and told she only had a 2% chance of

surviving.

At death’s door, she agreed to take part in a experimental

procedure with 10 other terminally ill patients.

One by one, she watched everyone around her succumb to the

disease, leaving her the sole survivor.

Sanchez said her brush with death defines everything she creates,

but her artwork is more a celebration of life than a reflection on

pain.

After creating each piece of clothing by hand, Sanchez sets into

tearing them up, adding stylized rips to some of her clothes that

blend ‘80s sensibilities with a taste of avant-garde.

She even applies acrylic paint directly to her jeans and shirts

and prides herself that no two articles of clothing are the same.

“People ask me if they can have five pairs of jeans or three pairs

of this or that and I tell them no,” she said.

“Did people tell Picasso how to make his paintings?”

In that same sense of vanity, Sanchez provides each person who

buys her clothes with an original painting of her vision of how the

clothes fit on them.

“There’s definitely a real blur in all of this,” said Kenneth

Richards, a guest at Monday’s show.

“Are the models wearing the clothes or are the clothes wearing the

models?”

Costa Mesa interior designer Meg Day said she saw a more

intertwined relationship between the two.

“You could really sense this atmosphere of energy from the models,

and that added something to the clothing,” she said.

“In turn, that energy pulsated through the crowd. It felt very

alive.”

Sanchez plans to continue to push forward with her fashion line

and hopes to open a one-stop fashion and beauty center in the coming

years.

In the meantime, she said, she will continue to pursue her

clothing line and draw inspiration from the world around her.

“Life is a piece of art,” she said.

“It’s up to us to decide how to make it our masterpiece.”