Fashion Week calls for nail designer

PALMER — It’s all in the details.

In the world of high fashion in the United States, there is no more important date than the bi-annual Fashion Week, where top designers and up-and-comers gather in New York to set trends for the next big thing.

While clothing designers generally take center stage, Fashion Week is also a big opportunity for artists who design hair, shoes and accessories. More recently, intricate and innovative trends in nail design have become important, too.

When the fall/winter Fashion Week kicks off Feb. 10-17, a Palmer nail artist will be designing nails for her first Fashion Week, an opportunity she said could be a huge career boost.

“Something like this can mean a lot for my career,” said Heather Davis, a 1994 Palmer High graduate and Creative Nail Designs associate. “There are actually agencies that represent big hair stylists and all those (fashion) magazines are starting to list manicurists. Going to events like this can get you noticed. They can start flying you around for photo shoots. This is a very serious open doorway.”

Four days a week, 10 hours a day, Davis does nails at Country Cuts in Palmer. Her work with CND is what propelled her to Fashion Week, an event you can’t attend without an invitation.

The Vista, Calif., group sends a team of nail designers to Fashion Week, and for the first time Davis is on the team.

“I didn’t speak,” she said about learning she was on the Fashion Week team. “I’m not at a loss for words very often. I was sitting at the top of the Space Needle with my sons and husband and I got an e-mail. I couldn’t talk. I was pretty sure people were waiting for me to start screaming, but I just started to cry.”

Davis put her 16 years of experience to work to create a set of concept nails she sent to CND last fall hoping to make the team for the spring/summer Fashion Week. When she didn’t hear about that, she was surprised to get a call for this upcoming event. And it’s a far cry from a performing a simply manicure.

“Fashion Week is a completely different breed,” she said. “This is pretty good stuff for a girl from Palmer, Alaska.”

In New York, Davis will be an apprentice on the team, turning out pre-designed nails for women modeling some of the world’s top designers, like Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Jason Wu. If she shines, she’ll be invited back.

At this level, there’s no room for mistakes, Davis said.

“We take our nails very seriously,” she said, adding she had to study at a design school in Nevada for six months and is licensed there with more than 600 hours of work.

That she and her mother also paint pictures helps Davis when it comes to applying her artistic palate to a small canvas like a fingernail.

“My gosh. Anything you can put on a nail that doesn’t look like a boring hand, you can do,” she said. “What I was mostly known for out here for a long time was, I can take anything you bring me and I can reproduce it perfectly on a nail.

“The most intricate thing I ever painted was a Pomeranian portrait, because she raised poms and was showing them at an AKC show.”

Davis started thinking about taking her nail art to another level “because I got sort-of bored with the regular thing, so I wanted to get out of the box a little bit.”

Instead of simply polish, she likes to do “extraordinary nails that look like cocktail rings, taking a nail and making it look like a piece of fabric with really fine threads of gold or silver or copper.”

One piece of advice she has for her clients in the Valley is that the traditional square-cut French manicure is out.

“I haven’t seen one of them in a Fashion Week book for at least seven seasons,” Davis said, adding she likes bringing that extra experience and technique to her clients. “I think the niche I’ve carved out is that I can make it customized to you, even if you didn’t know that’s what you wanted.”

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.