Diane Pernet has been a fashion-scene fixture for years -- quietly seated front-row at every major show, dressed in head-to-toe black, and dark cat-eye frames, with hair piled up Marge Simpson-style and shrouded in a chiffon mantilla. In one hand she holds a parasol; in the other, a Panasonic mini-DV (“I don’t feel comfortable with a big camera,” she explains in a throaty whisper). With it, she captures the goings-on in fashion’s inner sanctums, and posts it on her blog, A Shaded View on Fashion.

Six years ago, she came up with the idea of hosting a fashion video festival, but she was ahead of her time. “No one was doing anything but classic fashion-show footage,” she says by phone from her home in Paris. Oh, how times have changed. Tomorrow, Pernet and partner, Homeboy Films’ Dino Dinco, premiere You Wear It Well, the first annual fashion short-film festival, which opens in L.A. and will travel around the world. “Call me presumptuous,” breathes Pernet. “But I would love it to become the Sundance of fashion videos.”

The videos were solicited from people doing brilliant things in fashion and film. People like Ruben Toledo, whose 55-minute film (it’s the only non-short) called Fashion Nation explores the history of couture; photographer Marcelo Kraslicic, who filmed Chloe Sevigny getting a rise from Kai Kuhne’s designs; Jeremy Scott, who filmed a Dynasty-redux starring Tori Spelling; Jean Charles de Castelbajac, who made a film on Hello Kitty (Pernet “loves Hello Kitty”); and SHOWstudio, which has submitted two films -- one involving Alexander McQueen, the other Galliano.

There are also films by Kim Jones, Maison Martin Margiela, Bernard Wilhelm, The Museum of Fashion in Marseille, and, of course, Pernet. She has submitted three of her own, including a lo-fi documentary on the making of the Volkswagen GTI that Eley Kishimoto’s Mark Eley designed for last year’s Gumball Rally. That film inspired her and Dinco to finally pull the festival together.

The public will decide the winner, who will win a prize about as idiosyncratic and amusing as Pernet herself: “It’s a big white owl in a formal cape standing on a lava rock,” she says with a husky laugh.

See It:

You Wear It Well screens August 1st, 7pm-10pm, at Cinespace, 6356 Hollywood Blvd. 2nd level, Hollywood, (323) 817-3456. On August 3rd, it will be screened at San Francisco Supperclub, 657 Harrison Street, San Francisco. It then travels to Antwerp, then San Sebastian, with a possible pit-stop in-between in New York, during Fashion Week.

For more info: myspace.com/youwearitwell

Read It:

Check out Diane’s blog, ashadedviewonfashion.com

First SHOWstudio photo: Still from film by Nigel Buck, part of ‘Editing Fashion.’ Footage captured by Nick Knight, 2005, courtesy of SHOWstudio.

Second SHOWstudio photo: Still from film ‘The Bridegroom Stripped Bare’ by Alexander McQueen, part of ‘Transformer,’ 2002, courtesy of SHOWstudio.