Ahead of tonight’s annual Council of Fashion Designers of America awards—presented by the Pope of Trash himself, John Waters, and where Rihanna will walk away with the Fashion Icon Award—the fantastical vignette Shakedown celebrates this year's Swarovski Award for Emerging Talent. The first time a film has been commissioned exclusively by CFDA, NOWNESS enlisted filmmaker and frequent contributor Clara Cullen, whose visual grammar blends contemporary art with an irreverent approach to fashion. Cullen cast half a dozen new-wave ballers in handcrafted animal masks to go head to head in a playful dance-off clad in the nominees’ show-stopping designs, from the streetwear cult of Shayne Oliver’s Hood by Air to red-carpet regular Rosie Assoulin and menswear wunderkind Tim Coppens. “Each routine corresponds to the identity that I had in mind for the designers and the personality of the animal,” explains the Argentine director, who brought to life NOWNESS' interactive voguing experience. Taking cues from French literary classic Les Fables de La Fontaine, Cullen collaborated with set and costume designer Andy Byers of Isabella Rossellini’s trailblazing Green Porno series. “I’m always attracted to things that don’t correspond to the right box,” she says. “I wanted to contrast high fashion with a dorky, somewhat naïve idea.”