Yellowknife (Apr 29/05) - An up and coming Yellowknife fashion designer will hold her first runway show next Saturday.

Jamie Look started her company Goddess of War last year. She had intended to hold a show last fall, but postponed it until spring.

Model Carlie Krivda shows off one of Jamie Look's designs. Look's new company Goddess of War creates avant-garde body adornments of fur, hide and silver chain. Her first show is next Saturday night.

Now her designs, large-scale crosses between jewellery and accessories - some of them that can cover half the wearer's body - will premiere in Yellowknife at the Yk Actors Studio, May 7 at 8 p.m.

Look describes her pieces as body adornment.

"It's innovative avant-garde jewellery, made using traditional and Northern-based art and materials," she said. "It's very tribal, hard-core."

Some of the materials in her first collection include seal fur, caribou antlers and deerskin, along with metals such as silver chain and copper.

"This is an amalgamation of all the areas of design I've worked in over the last seven years," she said.

"I've always made my own jewellery. I've helped design shoes. I've worked in furs. I've worked in leather. I've made clothing. I've made bathing suits."

Look spent three years in the fashion program of LaSalle college in Montreal. When she returned to Yellowknife she began working with Karen Wright Fraser at Whispering Willows, learning to work with traditional Northern materials like hide, beads and quills.

Her runway show next Saturday is titled Mysterium Tremendum, which means "Great Mystery."

Look said she chose the name because, since it's her first show, it's an open-ended question where things might go from here.

The event will be as close to a professional runwayshow as Yellowknife has ever seen.

"There's going to be original music by Pat Braden," she said.

"The Crazy Legs Contemporary Dance Company is going to open the show with two dancers. And the models are all local girls and guys I've been running modelling workshops with."

Including the 12 models - two of whom are male - close to 35 people are involved in the project.

The pieces featured in the show will be for sale, but Look said she also has smaller pieces, not quite as wild, for the fainter of heart.

Look will be working frantically to bring everything together by the end of next week, but she said that kind of excitement is what she loves about her art.

"That's half the fun of working in fashion," she said.