Some time ago, when the trees still had leaves and you were wearing bare legs under your skirts, we took a look at Neodandi House of Couture on Western, where Niilartey De Osu sculpts, tucks, drapes, wraps, folds, and redecorates men’s and women’s fashion. If it wasn’t crystal clear back then, let me make it so now: the House is not just for viewing and purchasing garments but also for celebrating innovation, out-there ideas, and loosely held collectives of the like-minded. Parties. In other words, parties. Like the one scheduled for this Saturday, December 5.

“Off the Wall” was imagined by Niilartey and his wife Ulli as a fashion opera. What’s a fashion opera, you ask? Take Tommy, the rock opera, and throw more fashion in it.

Or, if you’d rather, take Phantom of the Opera and throw more rock in it.

Subtract the sopranos, add some urban street culture in the form of a runway show — plus an open bar and catering by Barolo, — and the fashion opera becomes an all-out, participatory dressed-up love song to the world of style and song that was Michael Jackson (because every opera needs a wizard, pinball, pop, or otherwise).

The show aims to celebrate not just MJ and Neodandi’s deconstructed post-modern-melting-pot world-influenced style, but the larger community as well. Three original designs will be auctioned off throughout the evening; all proceeds benefit Seattle’s Children’s Hospital.

Dancers, a DJ, a video artist, and you make up the after party; use this link to purchase tickets before they sell out.