Balmain to Stage Fashion Show at Tampa Art Museum

No one needs reminding that fashion and art go hand-in-hand, but the Tampa Art Museum is about to make that even clearer with a Balmain fashion show.

For its signature fundraising event “City: Fashion+Art+Culture” on March 29, the museum will present a runway show featuring the European luxury house’s spring 2025 collection. The event, which is the museum’s 14th annual one, will benefit the museum’s educational programs.

The museum connected with Balmain via the event’s co-chairs Enrique Crespo, Allison Guimard and Debra Williams, with Crespo, an interior designer, being key, according to its director of marketing and communications Nina Contreras Womeldurf. Four hundred guests are expected at this year’s runway show, which will be staged on the museum’s south terrace, which overlooks downtown Tampa and the Curtis Hixon waterfront park and the Hillsborough River.

Tickets start at $500 and there are sponsorship opportunities for those who want a VIP experience and a front-row seat. The top-level sponsorship is $75,000 for a presenting sponsor, which includes multiple tickets, access to a VIP hour and reserved front-row seats. Balmain, which has signed up as a sponsor at the $50,000 level, will not be receiving any proceeds from the ticket sales as the event is solely a fundraiser, Womeldurf said. The museum expects to raise about $200,000 with all of the proceeds going to its arts education programs.

Sponsors of the upcoming event were invited to a Balmain trunk show that was held recently at the Stovall House, a private club in Tampa, and a second trunk show that will be open to all ticketed guests is being planned in the area. The runway looks will include styles with intricate embellishments like complex pearl patterns, pictures and portraits, including some creations that required hundreds of thousands of beads and weeks of embroidery. Coinciding with the launch of Les Éternels de Balmain, a collection of eight fragrances, last fall’s spring show featured glittering embroideries of lipstick-ed mouths and red manicures on evening columns, sculptural cocktail dresses, jumpsuits and cropped jackets with jutting pagoda shoulders. Balmain’s creative director Olivier Rousteing told WWD last fall that he wanted to “include the beauty world into the fashion world, and I believe that that’s going to be a really strong twist for the future.”

Although Rousteing is not expected at the show, he and other members of the Balmain team relayed their ideas for the runway show, Womeldurf said. Ticket holders will enjoy an after party with Balmain representatives from the U.S. in attendance and they will receive a curated gift bag from Balmain at the end of the night. “The biggest challenge for us is how to scale this show because it is opening our doors to new audiences and it can also pave the way for future ‘City: Fashion+Art+Culture’ events,” Womeldurf said.

Balmain has no shortage of fans or followers, given the luxury house’s 12.3 million Instagram followers and Rousteing’s 9.9 million followers on his own Instagram page.

Thanks to this month’s show being a Balmain one, the museum has already lined up a designer for next year’s show, she said. “We’re not making any announcements so that Balmain is getting all of the attention. It is something that we will announce later this year.”

Originally started as the Tampa Museum of Fine Arts in 1920, the Tampa Art Museum is now housed in the 66,000-square-foot Cornelia Corbett Center building that was designed by San Francisco architect Stanley Saitowitz. Womeldurf said, “We’re just excited that Balmain chose Tampa Bay. We think it is a good reflection of the growth that we’ve seen in our area, and the diversity of talent that the Tampa Bay area is cultivating. One of the nice things about this is it is putting a spotlight on the whole region for us.”