“Daryl K I Am My Muse,” an exhibition at Verse Work in Red Hook—Dutchess County, not Brooklyn—transports the smoky, clubby downtown New York City vibes of the late ’90s to more bucolic environs. Organized by curator Nina Stritzler-Levine with Daryl Kerrigan and her partner Paul Leonard, the show pulls from the designer’s vast archives stretching back almost 35 years.
Kerrigan, who studied at the National College of Art and Design in her native Dublin, used her mother’s sewing machine to create designs that explored aesthetics outside of her standard Catholic school uniform. “Her first retail venture, writes Stritzler-Levine, “was selling dresses to the women on the streets of [her city] and in the night club she worked in.” After moving to New York in 1986, it was through retail, not the runway that the designer first made her name. (Kerrigan was the 1996 recipient of the CFDA’s Perry Ellis Award.) She opened her first shop in 1991 on Sixth Street in the East Village, and six years later she moved to 21 Bond Street, a space she occupied until 2012 before scaling back her business to focus on her Evergreen Collection.
From the start, Daryl K’s big draw was a good-fitting pant—be that lowrider boot-cut jeans, baggy models, or signature second-skin leather leggings. Speaking with Vogue in 2012, Kerrigan joked that her label could be called “Pants-R-Us.” It was the desire to find the perfect pant and a great jacket” that spurred her into business in the first place,” she recalled recently. Going through her archives while prepping the exhibition has proven, she noted, the longevity, reach, and relevancy of her work.
Kerrigan was known for an edgy downtown cool—Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon was an early fan—yet she asserts that what was once niche has since gone global. “This concept of downtown and cool, it reached everybody, I think. Along with iPhones [came] the commodification of cool. What’s interesting,” she continued, “is that everything that I created—not everything, but so many things—just became part of the vocabulary of fashion, [like] stretch leather leggings [which are] a ubiquitous style now.”
The exhibition organizes Kerrigan’s work into four themes: New York, Rebel, Woman, and I Am My Muse. The last is especially topical as it intersects with a larger discussion about the lack of visibility of female designers in an industry catering to women. Kerrigan, always her own fit model, believes that clothes have to move with and work for a woman. A successful garment, in her book, is one that’s made for life not just to look at. Below, Kerrigan talks about her exhibition and why the ’90s are so right for now.
Does being an independent designer mean something different today than when you started out?
I would say the basis is the same: You want to express your own ideas and not be influenced by anybody or judged by anybody; you can say what you want and say exactly what you feel. I think that is the essence of being an independent designer, independent in the way that you’re not being owned by anyone else’s ideas of what you should say.
It feels like the big brands are taking up more and more in space.
I look at my own collection, my exhibition here, and I look at what I have from then in terms of what I see that’s new, and it just made me consider that, yes, I feel like my spirit of yesterday still goes with what they are staying today; it hasn’t faded, it hasn’t diminished. That is one thing I know that I have. It felt good. I don’t know who the big brands really represent anymore, they’re just outfits that are not really sexy. I think I am representing what people—women—actually want to wear, regardless of their age. I mean, fashion has for so long just distanced itself from the actual woman. We know that so many people have an issue with that. Female designers are not in there designing for the females.
And what is fashion in the end? To me, I think it’s really fashion when people are actually wearing it, right? There are different versions, right? It’s just put on the runway and called fashion, but if no one is wearing it, maybe it’s something else, maybe it’s a concept. Whereas I think what fashion really used to mean is something that women wanted to wear and it became fashionable.
Tell us about your exhibition. What does it cover?
I haven’t stopped doing what I do. Since I closed my store in 2012, I still continue with a very small evergreen collection on my website, making clothes for women who continue to come and see me and purchase what I made. A woman came to see me about a year ago called Nina Stritzler-Levine, she’s an independent curator and writer, and she was with Bard College curating their shows for a long time, and she was researching female New York designers. She came down to see me and she just totally got absorbed…and wanted to create an exhibition.
It’s been really an exciting, [and] an unbelievable amount of work. I have all of my own archives stored—35 years of archives—so I’ve been going through everything…just pulling all the strongest pieces. I see my archives and I feel I really haven’t changed. I believe the looks and the clothes that I wear, they haven’t really changed very much.
I came up with this concept, a very novel way of presenting them, which I’m really happy about. I don’t like mannequins, I never really used them in my store, I just can’t stand plastic on a pole secured to the ground. So I started casting a bust from my dress form. We started making them out of papier-mâché and with plaster casting. So we’ve created all these busts and butts and they hang from wires from the ceiling and they all turn and move; it’s almost like a little party because…the clothes are in movement and the [forms] fit in a way that a mannequin can’t do. Somehow they’re really brought to life and it’s a real pleasure to see them in this way. You get to see the full garment in a circle and it kind of has a little bit of a magic to it. And that’s just amazing actually, because clothes are clothes and you look at the things on the hanger, and my clothes never had a huge hanger appeal. They always had to put things on because my fit is everything for me. And so we actually had to cast my butt for the pants. I needed to try to show the fit of my pants as well from back in the day. And I can’t buy any forms anywhere that are going to do that.
There’s another element of the show, which is these little drawings and paintings I’ve been doing, because, of course, life goes on and you find other ways to be creative. I mean, I love clothes, but I love graphic art and words as well…. There’s a movie I made in the ’90s with a friend and shot around New York with Miranda Brooks and three different women. We’ve also edited together…runway shows from 1996 through whatever we had, so it’s a real delve into the past, but it’s unbelievably relevant for today, I’m happy to say, especially now with fashion where it is. The looks from the ’90s are so relevant again because they really worked. We see girls everywhere wearing a skinny, skinny tank top and a pair of baggy pants, that was the look I started creating in the ’90s and that is the look of today.
What did you want to put into the world that didn’t exist when you started your brand?
I wanted a great pair of sexy pants to begin with—and a great jacket. In the ’90s there was nothing that felt the way I wanted to feel, whether that was influenced by music, rock ‘n’ roll or hip-hop. I wouldn’t have existed if it wasn’t for New York. I think about that, ‘If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,’ and I actually think it’s the opposite. I don’t know if I could have made it anywhere but New York. New York made me.
What do you want people to take away from this show?
I’m not going to go to my grave trying to make my label be some global brand again. But I really do like making clothes and I like making women feel good and showing them something that they can have that will improve their life. I enjoy that a lot. And I would like to introduce my brand to more people again through this exhibition. And I think it’s an amazing way to show work from my brand, which still has so much relevance that I can show these archives alongside the pop-up shop.
What do you think is the quality that gives your old clothes this ongoing relevance?
When you design clothes with a feeling for the body and a feeling for the woman and a feeling for the movement that she needs to be able to have and how she’s going to feel in those clothes—if you put all of those things together, you’ve created something that does not date. Like a pair of Levi’s jeans on a woman—that does not date. So I think it’s about the feeling, because I really consider very deeply how a woman is going to feel when she wears something and what her experience in that garment will be. It’s really important. And I test-drive everything I design. I still wear everything myself to make sure it feels right and it looks good. I’m not a model body, I’m a very regularly proportioned woman. So I can decide for many different women. Fit is just so important. For most of my career I was my own fit model. I’ll put on a jacket and make sure I can raise my arms and stretch them ahead of me and do a squat. And when I do nothing rips and nothing is pulling. And it’s so important to me.
