Staten Island fashion comes to the forefront in a new exhibition at Snug Harbor

When people think about fashion in New York City, they tend to focus on the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, where city dwellers are known to walk the streets in the very best designer outfits. Staten Island seldom enters the conversation.

But a new exhibition aims to put the “forgotten borough” on the fashion map – strictly on its own terms.

“Staten Island Mode: Identity, Memory, Fashion,” opening on Saturday at the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art at Snug Harbor, doesn’t emphasize high-end fashion designers, as many other exhibitions do. Instead, the focus is on everyday people and their connection to dressing up. According to its planners, the show is about identifying why people dress the way they do, and how Staten Islanders blend local history and memories into their fashion choices.

The show is billed as the “first major contemporary fashion exhibition on Staten Island.” Its curators, Jenna Rossi-Camus and Alexis Romano, grew up in Staten Island, but met while they were studying fashion history in the U.K.

“We’re very connected to our memories of growing up here,” Rossi-Camus said. “But at the same time, having spent time abroad, we look back differently on where we came from, and also stereotypes of Staten Island in the media that we’d encountered by people from other places in the world. Instead of trying to uncover secret histories from the distant past, we wanted to focus on what Staten Island was like today.”

Romano says the heart of the show is the idea that the style choices of everyday people are important when discussing fashion, because clothing – no matter how normal or eccentric – can be closely tied to identity.

“We were trying to make these sort of ordinary stories extraordinary,” Romano said. “We think that’s something that is specific to Staten Island, but also…