In the wake of tragedy, these Utah designers honored Afa Ah Loo with his own designs

A reverent and anticipatory silence overtook the second floor of the Natural History Museum of Utah. The Friday night audience, sitting in chairs that hugged the winding curves and slopes of the space, was eager for the Creative Pacific Fashion Show to begin.

A small head of long, brown hair bobs up and down in the distance on the tall staircase. People begin to crane their necks, handheld fans momentarily pause their up-and-down motions.

Then, young Vera Ah Loo finally appears and the show opens with a resounding bellow of encouragement from the crowd.

Vera, in her sage-green dress with ruffled sleeves and a big bow on the back walks along the twisting path of the makeshift runway, a heavy drum beat guiding her steps as the train of her dress glides along behind her.

After she completes her walk, another handful of models will follow after her, all a part of the “Afa Ah Loo Tribute Collection.” This collection, honoring one of the minds behind the show, began far before the models hit the runway.

The story behind the clothes on display this summer evening starts in the wake of a tragedy.

In June, Vera’s father, renowned fashion designer and community pillar Arthur “Afa” Folasa Ah Loo, was shot and killed at the Salt Lake City “No Kings” protest by a member of the event’s “peacekeeping” team who intended to hit someone else.

Fragments of comfort

Like most of Ah Loo’s creations, this collection started in his Salt Lake City studio, which he shared with two other local designers: Janae Pettit and Natalie Wynn. The studio is small and cozy, in a way that demands instant companionship. Pettit remembers the way Ah Loo’s “singsong” would fill the air. Now, it’s subdued and still.

“I just keep expecting him to show up still,” Pettit said. “I know he won’t, but I still can’t get it through my head that I’m never going to hear that again from him.”

The day after he died, she came to the studio.

“His stuff was still on the table,” she recalls, “and I just lost it.”

Wynn also came in that day. The pair grieved together in the space they shared with Ah Loo. Wynn crafted a shrine around his sewing machine, decorating it with flowers and photos to memorialize him.

Local news crews were headed to the studio to talk to the pair about Ah Loo, Pettit said, so she started tidying up.

There, in the ashes of an unimaginable situation, the friends unexpectedly found a scrap of solace in the bolts of fabric and spools of thread on Ah Loo’s side of the studio.

“I [kept] finding little sketches tucked away in random places,” Pettit said, “throughout all of his fabric over there, on the desk, randomly hung up over here, and I just start[ed] collecting them.”

By the time she’d finished finding the hidden treasures, Pettit gathered over 30 sketches. She and Wynn started brainstorming what to do with them. They contemplated making prints and framing them, but ultimately it was Wynn who had the idea of creating a tribute collection.

“We ended up gathering this group of local designers who knew [Ah Loo] personally,” Pettit said, “and had some history with him.”

From paper to runway

After getting permission from Ah Loo’s wife, Laura, each of the designers — Pettit, Wynn, Marie Keates, Natalie Clark, Kelley Burress, Destrie Mendoza, Mary Rino, Janay Robison, Lindsey Fitzgerald, Jen Williams and Ashlee Rudert — picked sketches to bring to life.

“We’re doing this tribute collection for him, using his fabric and his designs,” Pettit said. “We’re trying our best to channel Afa and do justice to his ideas, his concepts that he had.”

Creating the collection is an opportunity for many of the designers to give back to Ah Loo, who Pettit said always put “community over competition.”

“Those are the best ways we can keep his legacy alive,” she said, “is living like him, to have those same values as he did.”

The finished collection featured an array of patterns and fabrics. Many of the designs had some sort of bow element, true to Ah Loo’s original sketches. The custom necklines suited each model perfectly. Hues of red, green, black and brown brought the runway to life.

Ah Loo’s family closed out the collection Friday night. Laura wore a floral black dress with a high neck that flowed effortlessly — the only piece in the show actually made by Ah Loo. His young son, Issac, wore an outfit that complemented Vera’s: a green vest over a patterned shirt and matching green shorts.

Honoring Afa

At the end of the collection, the audience gave a standing ovation and many stopped to wipe tears. “Moana 2” director David Derrick Jr. and his wife, Tiffany, a production assistant on the movie, also attended the show. Tiffany Derrick was wearing an Ah Loo original piece that she once wore to the Golden Globes.

The show featured seven other collections from designers hailing from Samoa, the Navajo Nation, Guam and Fiji.

Benjamin Powell, who co-founded Creative Pacific with Ah Loo at the end of 2023, said the fashion show and its associated events are about making the industry better than he and Ah Loo found it.

“We just didn’t see a lot of Pacific Islanders in what we both do,” said Powell, a professional hair stylist. “At the end of the day, it’s the things that we wish we had in the beginning of our career[s] that we are wanting to give back.”

The intention behind creating the organization, which also hosts a variety of creative panels and workshops and a market, was to help connect and serve the communities they both belonged to: the creative world and the Pacific Islander community. The fashion show became a natural extension of that.

“We felt that [it] would be the icing on the cake,” Powell said, “to kind of show people what our career path can do.”

Powell said he is planning on creating a Creative Pacific scholarship in Ah Loo’s name next year, a “continuance of his story and how we came about.”

As those who knew Ah Loo continue to grieve, they also gather to celebrate all that he gave them in his lifetime. On Friday night, the community he started this fashion show to honor, held it to honor him.