‘Chopped’ Contestant Now Designing Clothes at 16

NEW YORK — For most students, this week is about getting settled in new classrooms, with final exams and presentations a remote concern. But Peter Wenger isn’t most students.

He is a home-schooled high school junior whose fashion design course is culminating in a runway show to be held Wednesday night in SoHo. It’s not an official event on the New York Fashion Week calendar, but there will be runways, models and about 200 people checking out his menswear and womenswear.

Anyway, Wenger still has time to achieve more. He’s 16.

This is an era when children make Instagram feeds for their sidewalk lemonade stands before they’ve squeezed a single citrus fruit, and every slime-loving kid wants to sell the glue-and-Borax mess on Etsy.

Wenger is comfortable professionalizing his passions. When he was 12, he participated in a tournament for teenagers on “Chopped,” the competitive cooking show, making a bok choy stir-fry with lamb shoulder and peanut crepes with an apple curry filling. He won one show but got cut in the finals.

He has moved on to fashion. Last week, he spent an early-morning hour giving a preview of his collection at Experience by Knotel, a snazzy showroom for a company that provides office spaces with flexible leases whose founders know Wenger’s parents.

His mother, Susan Danziger, is a founder of Ziggeo, a video technology company. His father, Albert Wenger, is a managing partner of Union Square Ventures, which has been an early investor in Etsy, Tumblr and Twitter, among other companies.

Danziger said she and her husband believe their children should be emboldened to turn their passions into educational opportunities. In planning a fashion show, she said, her son needed to find a reasonably affordable site, cast for models and manage invitation responses.

“Because I’m an entrepreneur and my husband is an investor, it’s in the air for Peter,” Danziger said. “He meets these young founders and sees that everything possible.”

The young Wenger was standing with Morgane Press, 30, his “fashion mentor,” whom he found through Craigslist. Since 2013, she has been teaching him how to sketch, make patterns, source fabric and sew.

“There was a whole interview process,” said Press, who was wearing black pants, a tank top, clogs and a baseball cap stitched with “PRESS.” “I had to film myself and talk about my background.” (Her qualifications include a line of her own, M Press.)

She was invited to the Danziger-Wenger home. “The door opens to this chirpy 12-year-old boy full of energy and he says, ‘I’m here to learn fashion and I want to build my portfolio.'”

Press has built “Project Runway"-like challenges (make seven full outfits in seven days) and field trips (including one to Paris this summer to see the menswear collections) into Wenger’s curriculum.

The show this week will be his fourth; the others took place at his father’s office and Soho House. Wenger chose Knotel because the ground-floor space is visible to the street and feels accessible and versatile, adjectives he feel apply to his designs as well.

“There’s definitely pieces that are a little out there in this collection, but most of them fall into the category of, ‘That’s achievable for the average person,'” he said.

In preparation for the show, Bryan Jackson, 26, one of the models, tried on a few looks, including cuffed wool flannel pants with thick seams and a nautical rope belt and a corduroy bomber jacket. “I feel cool,” Jackson said.

There also were overcoats made of waxed cotton and a long sleeve maroon half-shirt. “It crops really, really short and the model that we have wearing it shows some underboob but, you know, ‘fashion,'” Wenger said with an implicit hashtag.

He then had to dash. He had German class.