Foreign, Haitian designers display work in Haiti

PETIONVILLE, Haiti (AP) — World-class fashion has gone on display in impoverished Haiti.

Nearly three dozen designers showed off their latest tropic-centric creations at Haiti Fashion Week, which ended Sunday. Visitors came from places as close as the neighboring Dominican Republic and as far as Japan.

Organizers say it's the first time such that a fashion show of this scale has taken place in the Caribbean country, which is still slowly rebuilding from the massive earthquake in 2010 that destroyed thousands of buildings and displaced more than a million people.

The European Union-backed fashion show served as a rare forum for Haitian designers to bring wider attention to their long-overlooked work.

Dominican designer Socrates McKinney says Haiti has "a very strong culture, and that in some sense has to be reflected in the fashion."