By Jamie Ducharme, News Correspondent

GQ magazine may have named Boston the worst-dressed city in America this past summer, but that was forgotten the week of Sept. 23 when Boston Fashion Week came to town. However, the style celebration drew mixed reviews from Northeastern’s student fashion group, Haute Fashion.

Bianca Gracie, a middler communications studies major and president of Haute, said this year represented a marked improvement in the quality of Fashion Week.

This improvement was shown most notably with “The Tent,” a centralized location for many of the fashion shows, set up between the Prudential Center and the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

“The organizers have been looking at other fashion weeks around the world and trying to pinpoint what would work in Boston,” she said.

The Tent, Gracie said, gave Fashion Week a more “unified” feel, as in past years shows took place in various venues across the city. Despite these improvements, some Haute members, Gracie included, still feel that Fashion Week has a long way to go.

Gracie, who attended shows by Uruguay-born designer Victoria Dominguez Bagu, Boston-based Emily Muller and contemporary fashion label Lily and Migs, said the only show she really identified with was Lily and Migs, whose line featured college staples like skinny jeans, tank tops and party dresses.

“I liked the mix of the girly clothes with the really funky, edgy rock and roll music. They really created an atmosphere,” she said.

Both Gracie and club treasurer, sophomore business major Stephanie Zhang, said they weren’t thrilled with the conservative, older styles of Bagu’s show.

“I was kind of confused as to what season it was for,” Zhang said. “I thought it was for spring, but it was actually for fall. So that probably isn’t a good thing.”

Zhang also explained she and her fellow Haute members in attendance were able to move up a few rows due to lackluster attendance at Bagu’s show.

“They have to make [the shows] more known to the public and have more events open to the public,” she said.

Fellow club member and sophomore business major Sarah Darrow was unimpressed with the Lily and Migs show. She said Fashion Week as a whole needs improvement.

“I was slightly underwhelmed. I just feel like, even though we aren’t known for being a big fashion city, we have the resources to make a better Fashion Week. The marketing should be better. I wouldn’t have known about it if not for [the club],” she said.

To reach the revered ranks of fashion weeks in New York or Paris, Haute’s members said the City of Boston needs to cultivate a more vibrant fashion community.

“Honestly, Boston is just no New York,” Darrow said. “New York is more of a central hub for fashion. That’s where a lot of the designers and industry insiders are.”

Gracie said that, despite its impressive size, New York Fashion Week has a very open feel, and features many more opportunities to go behind the scenes than its Boston counterpart.

“There just wasn’t the kind of atmosphere where you could go outside the show and see an editor or a photographer or a producer,” she said.

Above all else, though, the group said improving fashion week is the job of the designers who participate in it.

“I like that [Fashion Week] allows new designers to showcase their collections, but the media could use bigger names to draw people in,” Zhang said.

Gracie said she felt that Fashion Week’s designers were talented, but perhaps not as polished as high profile fashion houses.

“The clothes in general were very fashion-forward, sometimes the tailoring was a little off,” she said.

To reach its full potential, Gracie said, Fashion Week just needs time to grow.

“Fashion is always changing, so there’s always going to be a new face,” she said. “It’s good to see emerging talent.”