What most conversations about New York Fashion Week miss, is that with some top names not on the schedule, the city, and the official CFDA calendar, have become a playground for independent and emerging designers. Every season there’s a newcomer to discover. (Recent breakouts include Colleen Allen, Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen, and Jane Wade.) This has helped New York regain its reputation as a place where talent is born. To those who say New York has lost its sparkle, we ask, which shows are you going to? Because there’s terrific fashion in New York City, if you know where to look.
What these four up-and-comers have in common is that their work visualizes the world ahead: From Grace Gui’s reflection on sustainability to Yamil Arbaje and Angelo Beato’s examination of society’s power structures at Leblanc Studios—these designers may currently have more questions than answers, but isn’t that how most great stories begin? Scroll through to discover their work.
Grace Gui’s Novel Sustainable Knitwear Asks What Are We Leaving Behind for the Next Generation?
Sustainability is a subject that often comes up in fashion, with various degrees of authenticity, so the first thing you need to know about Brooklyn-based knitwear designer Grace Gui is that she raises her own silk worms. “My grandmother and I started raising them when I was about 5,” she recalled at her presentation, adding that it’s not uncommon in Asian American communities. “There’s a WeChat group in every town with a silk worm dealer. We used to go behind the Costco and she’d throw me up into the tree to pick Mulberry leaves to feed the worms. We used the silk cocoons to wash our faces.” The rest of her materials she sources from nearby farms in the tri-state area—at her presentation, a sheet posted next to each of her model tableaux included detailed breakdowns of the provenance of each fiber (all from female farmers), dye (all natural dyes), and embellishment. A knitted boatneck t-shirt with a red and green diamond design on the front and ultra-low rise flared trousers were identified as “100% cotton sourced Lyndhurst, NJ; 50/50 Silk Merino deadstock, from Peru; 100% Alpaca from New York, NY; Iron (III) oxide from the soil; Natural Rubber Latex sourced from New York, NY.” The 21-year old designer is still in school—she’s studying knitwear business and bio-textiles at Gallatin. She calls her project “farm-to-fashion.”
But a new and interesting way of sourcing materials does not a great collection make, and Gui’s clothes really reflect the way the young people of her generation get dressed. As detailed above, there is an emphasis on the everyday with easy t-shirts, elastic waist trousers, and jackets and skirts with more playful details and embellishments; and for evening, her experiments with more sculptural shapes and sheerness are also spot-on. At her presentation, a young girl of about 7 or 8 held a tiny, stylish bag in her hands. “The bag is 3D-printed with cornstarch and sugarcane, the bottom is made from repurposed fishing line and inside is all the waste from the whole collection,” she explained. “When we talk about [sustainability] we’re asking, are we going to push the weight of our weight onto our children? Who will carry your inheritance?”—Laia Garcia-Furtado
Pipenco: Rewriting Dracula With a Tall Tale of “Melancholic Opulence”
Nosferatu’s mark on fall fashion—in the form of Victoriana—is as clear as a bite on the neck. Dracula himself, in Cat in the Hat headgear and feathers, made a dramatic appearance at Lorena Pipenco’s show. The collection was a reimagining of the dark tale, based on the Romanian versions she heard growing up. In those, the designer wrote, Dracula was not just a “villian, but a man lost in longing while the women in his wake were cast as muses, frozen in time.” Pipenco’s mission was to rewrite these women into history—in a big way.
When the models came out in huge, often bulbous, dresses and surreal club-kid shoes, made in collaboration with East Village Shoe Repair, the room seemed to shrink to dollhouse proportions. Exaggerated sizes and shapes are defining characteristics of Pipenco’s work. The fit of the clothes, which is often “off” has the effect, she explained, of “almost enlarging our perception of” the wearer. These are clothes as armor meant to create “a powerful moment for the model.”
In Pipenco’s world, sexiness is derived from a body that is covered up rather than one that is revealed. Still there were glimpses of skin visible through snagged knits hung with chandelier crystals. Peter Pan collars suggested a certain primness, but always with a campy sense of fun. A key look was a huge pillowy knit top with a portrait of a poodle print that had been salvaged from a chair. “My family, they decorate the house really crazily, [there are] weird textures everywhere. So [that dog] is also bringing that kind of homey feeling of upcycling,” said the designer who was born in Romania and raised in England, where she studied at Ravensbourne University London, before moving to New York to attend Parsons.
For all of the humor in the collection there was a serious message of women’s empowerment that seemed to be underlined when a hidden door slammed shut and a book fell heavily to the floor. “The story of Dracula is always about him,” Pipenco said. “Dracula became this creature because he lost the woman he loved the most, so it’s the beautiful woman actually being the purpose of most things. It’s just that idea that women are kind of everywhere.” And not to be ignored.—Laird Borrelli-Persson
From the Dominican Republic to New York Fashion Week, Introducing Leblanc Studios
“So many of us are here,” said Yamil Arbaje after he and his design partner Angelo Beato showed the fall collection for their label Leblanc Studios at New York Fashion Week for the first time. “There is a big community of Dominicans in New York.” Arbaje was speaking of what brought their collection to New York—he lives here, Beato in Santo Domingo, where the brand is still based—but that first line could have applied to the backdrop of their collection, too.
The pair put together a small show at The Standard Highline Hotel, which was affecting, even if slightly too dimly lit. “We started doing research about power dynamics in medieval times, and how power dynamics used to work there,” said Arbaje, with Beato adding: “and now it feels like we’re going back to that.” They built a collection around archetypes:the landlord, the white collar businessman, the blue collar worker, the farmer, the aristocrat—they were all represented in some pretty terrific tailoring, distressed taffeta shirting, cool overdyed jeans with the patina of hard work, and some covetable knits. Beato and Arbaje have been doing this for just over a decade, but are leveling up by joining the NYFW schedule.
Have you asked yourself recently after looking at the news, “how are we back here?” Many of us have, including these designers. But here we are, and we should talk about it openly and clearly, the way Arbaje and Beato did with their debut. The overall sensibility of their collection is a somewhat familiar one—Martine Rose and Vetements come to mind—but there is a clarity to their ethos, and a moody, anarchist sensibility to their very wearable clothes that is welcome in New York.—José Criales-Unzueta
Destroyer of Worlds
“What Ever Happened to Fun?” Destroyer of Worlds Has the Answer
Cole Durkee says that the ethos of his label Destroyer of Worlds is grounded in “destruction as creation.” The designer was most recently a studio lead for Zoe Whalen, with whom he shared an apartment during the pandemic—they both pursued secondary degrees at Parsons. Whalen was, in part, the reason why Durkee decided to take to the runway this season with an off-schedule show. “I’ve seen Zoe put together amazing shows on a shoestring budget,” he said backstage after his presentation, “so I just said…wait, I can do that too!”
Durkee’s work is part of a New York tradition that approaches fashion with irreverence and humor. He’s been on the scene for just about a decade—he made the look that Ru Paul’s Drag Race All Star Shea Couleé wore for the iconic season 9 finale of the show in 2017—but has only broken through with his label since 2022. This collection was centered on the idea of a post-apocalyptic, dystopian celebrity talk show. It was a sort of commentary on consumerism and our insatiable appetite for content, while also embracing how fun it is to engage with all of these pockets of popular culture. He referenced known celebrities—peep the nods to Dennis Rodman—and starry behavior and styling, from caps hiding the face to naked bombshell dresses.
Most interesting was the way he embraced the notion of destroying in order to create. He designed woven jeans and jackets with secondhand leather and denim, added latex to fabrics to make tops and dresses—some sexy, others bizarre and alien-like—and stuffed tubes of fabric to fashion weird, yet cool oversized jackets. Durkee is only getting started. What matters is that he seems to be having a blast, and that’s something New York Fashion Week could use a little more of.—JCU