Despite all the attention from the fashion community, America's top young designers are a tad shy when the cameras turn away from the clothes… and toward themselves. Minutes before Tuesday's Tribeca Film Festival premiere of Seamless, about the selection process of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award winner, the documentary's subjects admitted to preshow jitters. "You forget about the camera while it's happening," said Lazaro Hernandez of the victorious duo, with Jack McCollough, Proenza Schouler. "But we're kind of scared tonight." Peter Som concurred: "It's going to be weird seeing my face 6 feet wide on the big screen."

Inside, editors, models, and other fashion types settled in for the two-hour Douglas Keeve-directed film. Sponsored by HP, Movado, Redken, and Shiseido, and produced by Style.com's Candy Pratts Price, the movie follows a trio of disarmingly different finalists: the Proenza Schouler partners; Cloak's charismatic Russian tailor, Alexandre Plokhov; and the demure Doo-Ri Chung, who works out of the basement of her parent's New Jersey Laundromat. Moving from the comical (Plokhov compares Anna Wintour's studio visit to an unannounced appearance by Bill Gates at a software start-up) to the calamitous (at one point, a fire consumes all of Chung's work), the documentary serves as a reminder that all that glitters is not sold.

After the screening, an ebullient crowd gathered at Tunnel in Chelsea for cocktails and congratulations. "I loved it," said model Karolina Kurkova. "I was crying, it was so telling of what they go through." Nearby, Plokhov—who, along with Habitual's husband-and-wife team, took home a second-place prize—agreed. "None of what you saw was scripted," he said, before turning to his circle of admirers. "It's a once in a lifetime opportunity."

—Sarah Cristobal