Le Rich Couture Fashion Show at M2 Gallery

For more photos from the Le Rich Couture show, check out our slideshow.

On Saturday night at the M2 Gallery in the Heights, Le S. Richardson, the founder and CEO of Le Rich Couture, held a fashion show to showcase her new collection, as well as find the new face of the Le Rich brand. Sonia Azad of ABC Channel 13 got the crowd excited while each model waited to walk the runway. These weren’t ordinary run of the mill models either. Each woman was selected to compete because of her ability to overcome some significant handicap, disease or adversity.

The contestants competed in Little Black Dress, Evening Wear and Q&A competitions before the winner was decided. And the victor was Esmeralda Ramirez-Peña, chosen for her beauty, brains and outgoing personality. Ramirez-Peña will fly to New York and be the featured model in the 2011 Le Rich Couture Look Book.

And now to the clothes. Richardson founded Le Rich Couture to cultivate positive affirmations for young women. Her T-shirts bear empowering words like “love,” “beauty,” “strength” and “destiny”–a direct contrast to the trendy and vulgar shirts many young girls wear. As for the non-T-shirt designs, they reflected the different stages of love: flirty, work and romance.

This article appears in Jan 6-12, 2011.