The last Puppets and Puppets was tinged with bittersweetness long before it bowed. About a week before, Carly Mark—then hailed as one of New York Fashion Week’s brightest young things—had announced that it was not only to be her last in the city, but also her last ready-to-wear proposal, with the brand decamping to London to focus on its more profitable accessories business. That melancholy lingered after it was over: while it was spiriting to see a designer make such a tough decision on their own terms (a rare case), it was widely agreed that this swansong collection was her most accomplished to date.
Six months on, walking into the stately halls of London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, attendees at Puppets and Puppets’s big London debut were both overjoyed and a little perplexed to see not one, but 17 full ready-to-wear looks, with models ambling through a space delineated by a snaking black velvet rope.
This being a Puppets and Puppets show, there was a quirk to factor in. While the clothes were indeed ready-to-wear, you wouldn’t need to wait the typical six months to get your hands on them. In fact, if you strolled about 10 minutes from the show venue to the nearest branches of Zara or H&M you’d be able to find a good deal of it on the racks—boxy T-shirts, navy crewneck sweaters, skinny black jeans, plain lingerie sets, faux-fur trimmed hoodies and fedoras aplenty. A handful of white polos were screenprinted with a new Puppets and Puppets logo—an upside-down lion and double-P insignia, designed by Brent David Freaney, the artist and art director behind the visuals Charli XCX’s now-canonized album Brat.
Was Mark’s intention here an elaborate trolling exercise? Not quite. Rather than think of a fashion presentation solely as a forum for presenting new designs, she sought to evaluate its merit as a conceptual and artistic medium. In fairness, this logic is embedded in the brand’s origin story. “I was a fine artist from 18 to 30, and when I started Puppets and Puppets, frankly, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know how to sew or make anything,” Carly explained at the presentation “I’ve always been interested in fashion, but when it comes to making clothes myself, I’ve never felt that good about it. I’m more interested in fashion as a concept, and I’m interested in evolving the concept of fashion.”
Her decision to present what she called “a styled show rather than a fashion show” was both an attempt to move that needle and an exercise in distancing herself from a sense of obligation to create producible garments. Working alongside Paris-based stylist Taylor Thoroski, looks leaned into Mark’s familiar style vernacular, drawing upon her own dress habits. “Something I’ve learned over the years is that the things that I put down the runway are stronger, in my opinion, when they’re in line with me,” she said. “I’ve been very into not having pants on in the past. So we were like, ‘OK, let’s keep going there.’ And I’ve been wearing really simple jeans,” she says, pointing down to a slim-fit H&M pair she was sporting.
Of course, it’s been widely remarked that Puppets and Puppets is part of a lineage of art practitioners who’ve worked with fashion as a conceptual framework. Bernadette Corporation—the emblematic 90s Downtown New York fashion-as-art collective—readily comes to mind as an antecedent; presenting thrifted garments in impromptu runway shows, branded with the collective’s logo, was a key part of their modus operandi.
Their legacy has since been legitimized in both the fashion and art spheres. Funnily enough, just over a decade ago, a major retrospective of the collective’s freewheeling practice took place in the very building Puppets and Puppets showed in today. While this highlighted the rich precedent for using the ‘the fashion show’ as a conceptual vessel in itself, what fell short here was that the presentation’s format somewhat distracted from what was arguably its main purpose: the bags.
Indeed, the event marked the grand reveal of the first new accessory of Puppets and Puppets’s new era: an oblong shoulder bag, wrapped in a harness-like detail, in worn faux leather. Christened “The Pillow,” it’s a token of Mark’s recent journey across the pond: “I came up with this story that it’s an airplane pillow,” she said, “which represents me moving from New York to Europe. There’s something very comforting about it to me.” It’s certainly a desirable object—and seems to imply a notably muted direction for the brand, especially when placed next to the more outré cookie-appliquéd and banana-handled pieces that made a name for it.
While the setting in which it was presented was ambitious—and part of a sound conceptual premise—there remains some fine-tuning to do when it comes to synthesizing the high-concept approach with the fundamentally commercial nature of the task at hand. Then again, if anyone is primed to do that, it’s Mark: since setting out, she’s proven herself to have solid creative and business instincts. There may still be some further work needed to consolidate the foundations for the next chapter of Puppets and Puppets, but there’s cause for optimism in what she’ll continue to build.
