Andrew Curwen—the “Secret Weapon” of New York’s Buzziest Designers—Unveils An Electrifying Debut Collection
Fashion events that feel like they’re about fashion as opposed to the industry are increasingly rare these days. Yet at Andrew Curwen’s debut show in artsy Bushwick on Sunday night, the clothes were the main event. There were no street style photographers, few members of the press, and precisely zero boldfacers cutting the line. Mostly, it was Curwen’s family members and friends in the standing room-only crowd, though some of them do happen to be in the business.
The designer gave his electrifying first effort a name: “your last breath belongs to me.” In many ways it felt like an inhale, the true beginning of something, with explosive volumes, sharp cutting, and a sense of both angst and urgency that was palpable. Once he had exhaled, he hopped on the phone the next day to introduce his collection with a simple statement: “this is what excites me.”
Curwen was born in Lake Placid, New York—“Lana Del Rey and I are the best things to come out of that place,” he jokes. A military brat, he moved around the U.S. as a child before attending Parsons to study fashion design. “It was different than I expected,” he says. As a young person, Curwen was bewitched by the work of Alexander McQueen and John Galliano, which he discovered on Tumblr and on TV. Design school was less about the art of design than it was about thriving in the existing fashion system. “The people were the best part,” he notes. At Parsons, Curwen met Jackson Wiederhoeft, who was a year above him, and Elena Velez, who was a year below. Both designers were in attendance Sunday night.
Before graduating in early 2018, Curwen interned at Area (“that was a lot of rhinestones and crystals!”) but found it more instructional to work with fellow students on their thesis collections, Widerhoeft among them. “Seeing how different people operated was very helpful as someone who wasn’t as organized back then,” he said. Even more useful? Working at Beacon’s Closet, a much-loved New York second-hand store, and other consignment resale outposts. “It was almost like working at a fashion archive,” he said of those instrumental years. You see what type of clothing maintains or gains value over the decades, you see how clothes wear and which wear better.”
Still, after three years he was ready to “move back to the front end of fashion,” meaning the creation. In 2021, Curwen reached out to Velez, then a budding industry name, and offered to assist her. He stayed for three seasons, developing runway pieces, before moving on to Jane Wade, another New York up-and-comer, where he leaned into the production aspect of the job. (Wade was at Sunday’s event too.)
Curwen started developing this collection—a tight capsule of 11 looks—in February. “This is my way of introducing myself to an industry I love, one to which I’m giving all of myself to in a way that feels romantic,” he says. And indeed, his devotion to fashion is contagious and beguiling. You could sense it on Sunday night, as his peers gathered to watch the show, and it was written all over his face as he took his final bow, visibly trembling from the—let’s be frank—shock of having pulled it all off.
The skirt in his opening look, a shape he’d been “thinking about for years,” required three bolts of cotton voile to make. On subsequent looks, he shirred and shredded silk into shearling-like shapes that included a top, a bustle, and a cascading voluminous skirt, and cut the sharpest of shoulders into both suit jackets and a hoodie.
Asked to describe his own work, he turned to metaphor. “It’s difficult to say the words vulnerability and fantasy in the same sentence. Fantasy is the world that we escape to; vulnerability is showing a person a map to your safe place. But I wanted this to feel like that. This is where fashion could go. What fashion can feel like. A lot of fashion can get very sterilized and I wanted to make it exciting.”
Curwen’s inspirations—in particular the work of Alexander McQueen—were palpable in both look and spirit. That’s not a criticism, it’s a compliment. Few young designers are producing work worthy of comparison. He may be influenced by the way fashion looked and felt when he was coming of age, but what Curwen evoked with this debut was the rawness and sincerity of those times. He plans to keep the project small early on. “I’ve seen designers white-knuckle it, but I don’t see this growing quickly,” he said, “I want to keep this ship on a steady course.” All that to say, it’s too early for Curwen to be able to clearly chart his path forward. Often, the hardest thing to do is just start. He managed that part with aplomb.
Photo: Aana Mirdita1/12
Photo: Aana Mirdita2/12
