…of the first moi-edited issue of the Belltown Messenger, here are some pix I took last Thursday at the second annual Fashion 1st Boutique Fashion Show. Some 100 models showed off the wares of 16 area boutiques, most of them in Belltown.

Tom Douglas’s Palace Ballroom banquet facility was packed to the walls with an almost all-female audience. The event’s advertised hours were 6 to 9. The first two of those hours were devoted to drinking and schmoozing, before the runway saw any action.

Once the models started a-struttin’, they continued at a brisk, businesslike pace.

This model is selling Ottica eyewear. (What else?)

And here’s the organizer of this year’s event, Joan Kelly, with a spokesman from the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, which got a percentage of the $40 ticket price and the $120 “trash belts” being sold in the lobby. The event was dedicated to its first-year organizer, Jared Seegmiller, who’d died earlier this year after a brief bout with a rare form of heart cancer.