Thursday July 29, 2004 Casting Ballots With Fashion
NEW YORK — Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and Russell Simmons aren’t the only ones rounding up the troops to get out and vote in the upcoming presidential election. Composer and performer Imani Uzuri will be cheering on women in their 20s and 30s to cast their ballots at “Get Your Vote On!” Friday night at the downtown club Mission. The party and fashion show is a nonpartisan event that is designed to get women fired up about registering and voting in the Nov. 2 election. Rosario Dawson, Charlotte Ronson, Summer Phoenix, Liv Tyler and Moby are some of the better-known people expected to attend. The NYC Lucy Stoners, a group of female New Yorkers banding together to get young women informed and involved about the political process, is organizing the event. Member Rita Nazouki, who is a senior trend consultant in Promostyl’s New York office, said, “What we noticed was the single woman was definitely not a voice being heard in the polls.” Through such events, Lucy Stoners hopes to make single women as influential in the upcoming election as soccer moms were in the 2000 election, she said. The group is named after the late Lucy Stone, who among other things was the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree, the first woman in the U.S. to keep her maiden name after marriage and one of the founders of the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869. To get women excited about “Get Your Vote On!” the NYC Lucy Stoners decided to make Friday’s get-together a fashion event. Betsey Johnson, Malia Mills, Triple 5 Soul’s former designer Camella Ehlke and Super Lucky Cat are among the 22 designers who created politically minded T-shirts that will be modeled in a fashion show and then auctioned Friday. Some Old Rubies, the Lower East Side store owned by Summer Phoenix, Odessa Whitmire and Ruby Canner, also provided a T-shirt. Bidding is expected to open at between $30 and $50 and could go into the hundreds of dollars, Nazouki said. All proceeds will benefit the Third Wave Foundation, a nonprofit group that supports the leadership of women between the ages of 15 and 30 by providing resources, public education and networking opportunities. American Apparel and Triple 5 Soul are sponsoring the bash at Mission, along with the NYC Lucy Stoners, Lifetime Television and Alphabet City Design + Marketing. About 200 to 300 people are expected to attend. Guests are asked to bring a government-issued ID to be registered to vote.