At the recent LA Fashion Week show from her brand R’s Visual Thing, Radka Salcmannova produced an event featuring dancers, a magician and what every Hollywood producer wants; a big concept.

The show’s concept was inspired by Angela Rockwood. She’s a model and actress enabled by a wheelchair. People unfairly judge people on wheelchair  Salcmannova said. The designer wanted to produce a runway show, which would include women in wheelchairs – and show the world their power, beauty. To show them without the social judgment.

“Let’s erase the wheelchair,” Salcmannova said. For the show, several wheelchair-enabled women walked the LAFW runway – with the help of parachute harnesses attached to male dancers mostly covered in shrouds. No longer in wheelchairs, the women were attached to the male dancers, who provided the legwork necessary to go down the runway. Salcmannova said it looked like the women were walking.

Able-bodied female dancers also walked the stage. Choreographer Nina McNeely put together a dance to dramatically portray Salcmannova’s designs.

Born in 1986 in Prague, Salcmannova is a particularly complex creative artist, mixing to stunning results her degrees in psychology and visual arts. Before deciding to push art-fashion carrier, she worked in New York as a film maker and art director and art assistant with Matthew Barney, Marian Sell, Carolina Sarria and Leo Kuelbs.

Now, this “Visual Thing” pledges to continue breaking trends and conventions on her own, by using completely unconventional materials, textures and settings, and offering her audience something that transcends fashion as we know it. You can find her style at that junction where Tim Burton’s gothic fairy tales meet Lynch’s eerie psychedelia.

As a commentator bluntly put it after she left her audience in awe at the LAFW, “this girl is taking fashion to a whole new level (…) she is bringing it to the next level”.

Her success as an artist came with her first art film exhibition at Manhattan Bridge, New York. Since then she exhibited in New York, Berlin, Los Angeles, Vienna and Czech Republic. She was Art Director of several runway shows at New York Fashion Week and in Fall of 2017 launched her first own haute couture collection at Los Angeles Fashion Week. On that occasion Vogue UK nominated her at the category “Three Designers to Know from LA Fashion Week 2017” and received the “Designer of the Year” award from LAFW.  In 2018 she also appeared as one of rising designers at New York Fashion Week at Pier59. Radka Salcmannova also keeps working with numerous artists and fashion designers as a Creative Director delivering strong aesthetic to each brand with individual approach and care.

“My passion for creative art production comes from the fact that I am an artist first. The role of art director developed naturally for me and through film production I began dabbling in fashion design.

I love to produce and art direct every aspect of the given project and use visual aesthetic fitting project / client with individual care and custom-made approach.

My aim is to create a unique and interactive experience leaving the audience with the feeling of being part of the journey – and no matter if that journey is runway show, editorial or commercial.”