The Last Sunset: Go Down in Flames, Fashion Show & Designer Competition

The Lobo Theater on Central has been a lot of things over the decades, and it wears all of them at once. The 1938 Art Deco bones are still there – the marquee, the curves, the sense that someone built this place to mean something. Nob Hill on a Sunday evening has its own particular energy: slower than a Friday, more deliberate, the kind of crowd that actually chose to be somewhere instead of ending up there. This is a standing room 21+ night, which means the usual theater formality goes out the window and the building becomes something you move through rather than sit in.

The Last Sunset brings original collections from New Mexico designers down the runway inside that house, and the format is doing something the standard fashion show doesn’t bother with. Your ticket is your ballot. You vote on both the Designer Award and the Model Award, which means you’re not passively watching looks go by – you’re making a decision, which changes how you pay attention. There’s a real difference between admiring a garment and judging it, and that distinction runs through the whole evening. Between collections, a vendor market spreads through the building and the photo ops are built into the architecture itself, so the Lobo isn’t just a backdrop, it’s part of what’s being shown.

Doors open at 5:30 and the runway starts at 6:30, and that hour matters. The people who show up at 6:25 will find a packed room; the people who come early get to actually see what’s in the market and figure out where they want to stand before the lights change. On a Sunday in early August, this is a complete evening in a building that doesn’t get used like this often enough – original work, a vote that counts, and an Art Deco room doing what it was always meant to do.

Browse more events on the Route 66 corridor at liveonroute66.com.