Fashion Forward

This month, look for Monroe-based fashion designer Hannalei Taylor’s latest styles in her eponymous collection at the increasingly high-profile Charleston Fashion Week, which attracted more than 5,100 attendees last year. (And if the event weren’t prominent enough, season six Project Runway contestants Carol Hannah Whitfield and Gordana Gehlhausen are CFW veterans.)

Taylor, thirty, was chosen as one of eight finalists for the Emerging Designer Competition from a pool of more than sixty applicants. Among those judging her fate were designer Cynthia Rowley and Project Runway alum Mychael Knight." Just talking about [Charleston Fashion Week] gives me goose bumps," Taylor says. "I did a small clothing line in college, but never anything on this scale."

That’s not to say the wife and mother (daughter Olivia Claire is two and a half; husband Chad runs a Marine recruiting office) isn’t without fashion chops. She has a design degree from Radford University and interned in New York City with ready-to-wear line Araks. Her work is “feminine, with a youthful aspect,” she says. "I have a lot of fun with fabrics and textures."