Before each Fashion Week, editors and buyers get ready for the fight over front-row seats at the big budget, highly popular shows – Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan. But there is a fashion experience even more highly prized by industry insiders: catching the breakthrough collection by a promising young talent destined to become the Next Big Thing. How does one spot these soon-to-be stars? One of the best ways is to look at the list of the year’s Ecco Domani award winners.

The Italian wine producer Ecco Domani’s yearly Fashion Foundation award for emerging designers, founded in 2002,is a unique success story. Not because it’s the only one of its kind, because it isn’t. The reason for the award’s stellar reputation is the jury’s ability to pick truly exceptional winners. Practically every one of the previously unknown recipients is considered a red-hot name in the business today: Zac Posen, Peter Som, Proenza Schouler, Derek Lam, and Jeffrey Chow are among the past winners.

“The quality of our winners is extremely high,” said Ruth Finley, a judge on the Fashion Foundation’s panel and the publisher of the Fashion Calendar, which lists every fashion event in New York. Ms. Finley has helped schedule the New York runway shows for the past 40 years, and is probably more familiar with talent-spotting than anyone else in the business. She often acts as a liaison between Ecco Domani and completely unknown creators by urging the gifted young designers she comes across while working on the Fashion Calendar to apply for the award.

“This prize has become very prestigious in a very short time,” she said,”because it helped put people like Zac Posen on the map.”

Indeed, Mr. Posen was one of the first Ecco Domani winners when the competition started in 2002, along with Peter Som and As Four. The following year, the grant helped launch the internationally successful careers of Proenza Schouler, Project Alabama, and Cloak, and in 2004 recipients included trendsetters such as Libertine, Derek Lam, and Jeffrey Chow. This year’s lineup looks just as promising, with new and gifted designers Thakoon, Costello Tagliapietra, Jasmin Shokrian, Mary Ping, and Richard Chai in the women’s design category, and Trovata in the men’s design category.

“The prestige and honor is even more important than the money,” said 43-year-old Jeffrey Costello, one half of designer duo Costello Tagliapietra, among the current crop of winners. “The award definitely gives you a lot of credibility,” he added. Costello Tagliapietra has sold its creations at Barneys New York in Japan for almost two years, but last September marked the debut of its first full collection. The label’s beautifully tailored and expertly draped jersey looks display an assured sense of feminine elegance that is rare among emerging talents.

Costello Tagliapietra’s previous collection has already received some attention among press and buyers, but its Ecco Domani-sponsored show on February 11 is sure to bring out a much larger and more influential crowd, which is actually the whole point of the prize.

The entire sum of $25,000 has to be spent on a runway presentation during February show season. This can be a somewhat bittersweet deal for young designers who might prefer to pump the money into their fledgling businesses. However, Mr. Costello is happy with the arrangement. “It means that we can choose a nicer venue and afford to create more looks than we normally do,” he said. “It gives us more creative freedom. And let’s face it, that’s the reason why we wanted to be designers in the first place.”

The rules also stipulate that applicants must be over 21 years old and hold at least one retail account, but not have been in business for more than three years. The three-year limit is the tough part of the qualifications, since it usually takes designers a few years to grow into themselves and produce really good work. But it also opens the door for prodigies like Thakoon Panichgul, who has only been in business since February 2004.

“It’s a bit overwhelming for me to think of where I was exactly a year ago and to be here winning the Ecco Domani award,” said the 30-year-old Thai-born designer. Last year, he presented a taut and driven capsule collection of 10 pieces. His pared-down silhouettes and innovative use of fabric quickly gained him an avid fan base among fashion-forward New Yorkers. Although Mr. Panichgul has opted to show at the same venue as last season, the popular presentation space Drive In Studios, he said that the award eliminates the pressure of keeping the show’s budget as low as possible. “And the icing on the cake is that I don’t have to worry about finding alcohol for the show!” he en thused while showing me some pieces from his Spring 2005 collection.

“I like simple ideas,” he said, pointing to a skirt that had been turned inside-out, transforming the delicate inside finishing into a decorative element. He likes to use materials such as silk, taffeta, and cashmere. “It all begins with fabric,” he said. “It’s enormously important – it’s the thing you put next to your body.” Hence, the sensual element in Mr. Panichgul’s work comes not from revealing skin, but from the way the fabrics envelop the body. His spring collection included a few sweetly padded silk looks inspired by turn-of-the-century children’s clothing.

While all of this year’s winners have put in tremendous time and effort to produce the kind of high-quality clothing that won them the award, none has worked harder than Mary Ping, who started her first label three years ago. The Chinese-American native New Yorker is a bit of an anomaly in the fashion world. Twenty-six years old, she has climbed her way up from total obscurity on the strength of hard work and talent alone. When she created her label, she started completely from scratch. She did not have the social network that comes with a fashion school education or the kind of media connections that can help put a budding designer on the map. But she did have plenty of good ideas and the skill to pull them off.

When Ms. Ping was 4 years old, her grandmother noticed that she had a strong curiosity about clothes and so taught her how to sew. Ms. Ping’s grandmother was an excellent fashion mentor – she had been a famous socialite in precommunist China. The young Mary was a meticulous child who was intrigued by old-fashioned craftsmanship and classical beauty. By the time she was in grade school, she had created her own wardrobe. “I knew from age 6 that this was what I wanted to do for a living,” she said. Even so, she did not attend fashion design school but got a fine arts degree instead. After college, she did a brief stint at St. Martin’s School of Design in London and interned with the British designer Robert Carey-Williams.

When she returned to New York, she set up shop in a leftover sitting room in her uncle’s house in Queens and started working on her two labels: the more luxury-oriented Mary Ping Collection and Slow and Steady Wins the Race, a lower-priced line that explores high-fashion concepts in inexpensive materials.

Both labels were short-listed for Ecco Domani, but the higher-end Mary Ping Collection ended up winning. And while Ms. Ping was ecstatic over the recognition, she was somewhat baffled by the thought of spending $25,000 on a 15-minute catwalk presentation. I’m so used to putting on shows on a shoestring budget,” she said. “At first I didn’t even know what to do with all that money. But then I realized that I always depend on all my friends to work for free, and now I can actually pay them.”