SC103’s Sophie Andes-Gascon and Claire McKinney picked up sticks and moved from a small space in FiDi into a red-brick warehouse in Red Hook. “We are on the water side of the pier facing the Amazon building,” read the text with directions to the brand’s new digs. When I arrived the sun was out patterning the water with diamond sparkles and a few humble boats were docked in the shadow of the e-tail giant’s silver and blue monolith facility, which is just down the street from IKEA. Even before I crossed the threshold of the 1869 building, I felt transported to another, mythic world. Here was another version of the David and Goliath story writ large; and one that relates to the new New York Fashion Week, where indie names predominate, and the industry as a whole where small independent businesses are holding their own against the power and reach of larger, luxury, legacy businesses.
Europe, by the way, doesn’t have a monopoly on the idea of legacy. Andes-Gascon and McKinney are carrying forward a craft tradition in New York fashion that can be traced to their mentor, Susan Cianciolo, and even further back to collective enterprises like Stephen Burrows’s O Boutique and Serendipity 3. While not rough-hewn like the stone walls in the hallways of their workspace, SC103 has never chased the idea of “perfection” and there is no slick marketing around what they do. The label’s output can be likened to a drawing, as opposed to a photograph, because its evocative and tentative, rather than definite or pre-determined, which allows a different kind of engagement with it than things that feel more mass-produced and polished.
This “loving hands” quality can be attributed to how the designers work. This season, McKinney explained, their starting point, at times, was “just cutting into fabric without really a plan and cutting out shapes and sewing them together and it being almost origami without the folding, but [with] the construction detail.” Spring’s focus on squares and rectangles ceded to a concentration on triangles and squares rotated 180° to emphasize their points rather than flat sides. The insertion of a triangle at the neck of a striped dress with rustic nightshirt vibes created a cap-sleeve shoulder-emphasizing inverted triangle silhouette; a triangle in the neck of a top pieced with plaid inserts created a funnel neckline. These are attributes often associated with ’80s fashion, which is currently enjoying a revival, and you can read them that way if you want to, but as with all things SC103, there was a sense that lines and boundaries are flexible rather than fixed—sort of like their cult bags, which have an element of airy suspension to their construction. Those qualities were carried over to knitwear for fall—note the dramatic scarf in the opening look. Also statement making were shirts with solid insets running down the length of the sleeve, which created a sense of dimension and inwardness that contrasted with the joyous peacockery of red-washed patchworked denim festooned with buttons and flowered magic slippers that looked like they were made for walking on air.
While this collection spoke to developing trends of the season, its significance was firmly rooted to place and collective, crafty ways of working. McKinney said the looks were “a reflection of the space in a lot of ways, even pulling from some of the colors that were already existing in it. We’re constantly putting things on these walls and looking at them against different textures that are in the room or laying them on these tables that we’ve wrapped with papers.” As the building is historic, many of the accoutrements vintage, and some of the materials deadstock or upcycled, these clothes spoke to the past and present. Visitors to the brand’s new work space can also see pieces from collections old and new, noted Andes-Gascon, whose pottery sculptures of rooms (including a very accurate rendering of their old digs) decorate the new space.
“When we started this,” McKinney said, “all we wanted to do was have a show and we had no plans to make a brand.” Added Andes-Gascon: “I wouldn’t say that what we’re doing is the way, but coming up with a plan and a goal has never been the way that we’ve worked. It’s really when I realized that a lot of what we like to do is naturally being at home and sewing and working on the little minutiae of everything, that I knew this will work in some way.” At SC103 things progress from heart, to hearth, to hand. This is fashion at its most personal and imaginative; a dream that grows in Brooklyn.
