On Thursday night, the industry decamped to Northampton to celebrate Ralph Lauren’s reign as an icon of American style. But in Manhattan, at the Church of the Village in Chelsea, Women’s History Museum’s Mattie Barringer and Amanda McGowan cemented their status as some of the city’s most exciting experimental designers.
Titled Indestructible Doll Head, the show opened with a model in a cream canvas dress with cutouts at the waist and an asymmetrical hem, screen printed with bold black block letters and embellished with small shards of glass like a mosaic. Somewhat legible beneath the glass were the words New York, they ignore you, and they laugh at you. The white sky-high pumps on her feet were also covered in glass. A bikini top was appliquéd with two life-size pigeons, one at each breast. Were they about to attack the model, or was someone coming for them? Pennies were turned into chain-mail bikinis and belts; shark teeth were strung together into head coverings and necklaces like amulets.
“We’re very New York centric,” McGowan said at their Ridgewood studio a few days before the show. “We’re fans of New York vibes, the triumph and despair of [living] here. But we’re also thinking of our friends and how they feel they have to wear suits of armor to walk around and interface with the city.” It is often said that New Yorkers’ all-black dressing is a form of armor, but for Barringer and McGowan, it is the city’s own detritus, its animal tendencies (“New York will eat you alive!” goes the saying), that becomes a tool for protection.
Their spring 2025 offering was a continuation of the themes they explored at their off-calendar show last February. That collection included sporty separates printed with words identifying cuts of meat, like on a cow or pig; two long dresses with images of the Empire State Building across the front and cutouts at the nipples that were conjoined in the back by a loop train screen printed with words for parts of the body and phrases like your fear is my fear, your guilt is my anxiety, and your love is my happiness. And there were heels with lion paws and boxing gloves at the toes, an homage to the legendary Miguel Adrover.
It was a fitting reference, since the WHM duo also approaches their fashion practice through a conceptual, ideas-first manner. The two met during their first year at NYU Tisch in the late aughts. McGowan, a native New Yorker from the Bronx, was enrolled as a premed student. “There was no interest in fashion or art in my family,” she recalled. “My parents are both very practical and hardworking. I made my own clothes in high school, but going to school for art or fashion wouldn’t even be an option. It was more like, ‘You’re good in school, so you’re going to become a doctor or a lawyer,’ but you know, you can’t fake going to med school.” She was a very shy, quiet student who went to a Catholic school and discovered the power of fashion as a tool for communication during a picture day. “I put all this effort into an outfit, and people liked it, and something clicked. I was like, Everyone loves what I’m wearing, and I’m able to talk about it and not just be mute.”
Barringer was born in DC but later moved to Las Vegas. “I grew up Mormon, so my fashion identity started to emerge when I lived there,” she said. “Seeing billboards with showgirls—it was all very forbidden. Women’s clothing is very controlled in Mormonism.” Her mother and her grandmother—who was Orthodox Jewish before converting to Mormonism—were both into fashion and often wore Comme des Garçons to church. But her earliest fashion memory is not of those clothes but of the things they were forced to wear underneath. “They have to wear these knee-length dresses made out of this really icky nylon fabric, and they have these ugly elastic scalloped details, and I remember just thinking, I can never, ever wear that.”
She moved to New York for school with the idea of getting a degree in cinema studies. “Moving to New York was the first time I got to express myself fully with what I wore. There was that idealism of, Now I can wear whatever I want, but of course, in the real world, there is just a more heavy sexualization when you wear whatever you want, and you need to protect and hide yourself or you’re going to be traumatized.”
At NYU, the two bonded over their interest in fashion and swiftly transferred to Gallatin, where they created their own fashion-adjacent majors. “Initially we thought we were going to make a magazine, and then we realized that it was expensive,” recalled McGowan. Naturally, they started a blog instead. But there was still a desire to make something tangible. “This was a really specific time on the internet with Tumblr, and Instagram was just beginning, where there was a kind of collage process that would happen, and we’d become obsessed with random obscure images,” added McGowan. “But we still loved physical magazines as well.”
“We’ve been into vintage clothes forever—that’s how we first bonded—so we had all this stuff we collected that informed our practice and designs,” added Barringer. And so vintage clothes and other found objects became the raw materials for their work.
“We were into a couture runway sensibility, and we just wanted to make stuff,” said Barringer. “We weren’t interested in making wearable clothes.” When it came time to name their project, the name came naturally. “We used to live together and had a very tiny closet, which we started calling our museum, just joking,” said Barringer. And so, in 2015, Women’s History Museum was born.
“We didn’t have training, so we would just ask ourselves what we had the capabilities to make,” explained McGowan. They quickly found themselves part of the city’s ever present fashion-as-art scene (or is it art-as-fashion?), and in 2018 they held their first solo show-cum-pop-up-store at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. They’ve since staged solo exhibitions—which also include sculpture, painting, drawing, film, and performance—in galleries around the world, including at Company Gallery in New York, Berlin’s Center for Contemporary Arts, and the Luma Westbau Foundation in Zurich. Most recently their garments were exhibited in “The New Village: Ten Years of New York Fashion,” held at the Pratt Manhattan Gallery earlier this year.
The pair had also begun selling vintage clothes through their website, and in 2022 they opened a physical store in Chinatown. The success of that store has helped them offset the cost of producing their collections and shows. Although when they started almost a decade ago, they had no interest in making real clothes, now their goal is to be able to produce real ready-to-wear. “We get so much joy from people wearing our clothes,” Barringer said. “We make them so people can enjoy them and feel powerful. I feel like we’ll always be doing a variety of things and always have that weirdo edge, but at the same time, a big goal for us is to give people access to our clothes.”
A few days after the show, I found a photo showing the whole text they screen printed across many of their garments this season. It reads: “NEW YORK First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. THEN YOU WIN.” And Women’s History Museum certainly has.
