According to Internet calculations, there is a distance of about 8,000 miles between the 19th-century former-bank on 422 Main Street in Franklin, New York, and the New World Tower at 16-18 Queen’s Road Central in bustling Hong Kong. The latter is home to the celebrated Joyce boutique; the former to Gary Graham 422, Gary Graham’s new independent label. Together with Joyce’s Danny Chow and Judd Crane, Graham is collaborating on a collection of unique pieces set to launch in store on August 3.
Facilitated by Instagram, this was a project carried out mostly online and through in person visits from Crane. “I just kind of grouped things together, piles of fabrics that would become a garment, and I would send them images; that’s kind of how we worked back and forth,” explains Graham. The result is a capsule centered around a series of unique surplus and vintage tapestry cocoon coats, with pieces like printed slips and crinoline dresses to wear with them.
Having scaled down his business, the designer, a one-time CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist, has shifted his focus from ready-to-wear to smaller production, which has allowed him to render his pieces in actual vintage fabrics rather than historically inspired ones. In short order, vintage tapestries, which are often narrative, depicting pastorals or adventures, have become a signature. The pandemic and the Black Live Matter movement have changed the world. “Everything is different,” says Graham, including the way he perceived imagery that he once “thought was kind of benign in a different way.” He asked himself how he could “face or at least comment on” the presence of the fictional conquistadors in these tapestries, which, he notes, have their own secret histories of labor, etc. “I feel inept to speak to it,” demurs Graham, who says he kept coming back to the beauty he found in images of graffitied statues, and took the decision to “embroider over the patriarchy.”
He enlisted the help of recent Parsons grad Vera Powley to stitch over the human forms, blurring the faces and essentially tagging the tapestries. “I used William Morris’s wallpaper as a loose inspiration, but also just kind of intuitively embroidered,” says Powley, adding that the over-embroidery takes the design “to a whole different context and it makes it more personal.” Not to mention political.
Powley also sees in it a new way forward for fashion. “I’ve always loved Gary’s ability to create these super personal, really heartfelt pieces that are rooted in history and romance, but also have a statement and they mean something,” she says. Graham’s relocation from the city to upstate, “his being able to work so small scale, using resources that he has available to him, is what I think the future of fashion is going to look like.” A wise reminder that big changes start with small steps.
