Brooklyn revives The People’s Runway for New York Fashion Week
Five Brooklyn designers can win $5,000 grants, mentorship and a Borough Hall runway slot as The People’s Runway returns to NYFW. Colm Dillane and Antonio Reynoso are backing it again.
Brooklyn is using New York Fashion Week to do something Manhattan rarely does well: hand the mic to borough talent before the rest of the industry decides they matter. The People’s Runway is back, and with KidSuper’s Colm Dillane and Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso behind it, the show reads less like a one-night stunt than a real pipeline.
The 2026 open call went live June 15, and it is open to Brooklyn residents ages 18 and older. Applications close July 5 at 11:59 p.m. Five selected designers will each receive a $5,000 grant, mentorship from fashion industry leaders, and the chance to present five complete looks at a full-service show at Brooklyn Borough Hall this fall, with local reporting placing the return in September. That is the whole point: not just visibility, but access, money, and a stage that actually leads somewhere.
The credibility comes from what happened the first time. The debut People’s Runway, staged Sept. 14, 2025, was an official CFDA New York Fashion Week show and pulled in more than 1,000 spectators. It was also a spectacle in the best borough sense, staged in the open air at Brooklyn Borough Hall Plaza, with the Brooklyn United Marching Band opening and closing the event. Ms. Lauryn Hill, Ne-Yo, and Busta Rhymes were in the crowd, which told everyone in the room exactly how seriously the city was taking this thing.
The 2025 lineup came out of hundreds of applications and gave five emerging names a very public boost: Ahmrii Lorraine, Daveed Baptiste, Kent Anthony, Rojin Jung, and Shriya Myneni. Each designer got a $5,000 grant and mentorship from Dillane, Fashion Week Brooklyn founder Rick Davy, and Outlander Magazine, the kind of support that matters when you are trying to move from a promising lookbook to an actual career.
Dillane has said he got his start in fashion just a few blocks from Brooklyn Borough Hall, which gives this project real texture instead of polished civic PR. Reynoso has been just as direct about the borough’s appetite for investment in its own creatives. Put together, the message is blunt: Brooklyn is trying to build an alternative gateway into fashion power, one that does not wait for Manhattan to validate the talent first.
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