Graham Tyler Is a Millennial Designer With a New-Old Aesthetic
There are lots of misconceptions around Fashion Week, the most prevalent being that it’s all glamour and paparazzi flash. Not true. It’s a wondrous journey of discovery—taken at a frantic pace. Oases of calm in this storm of activity are rare and cherished. One such respite was provided during New York Fashion Week by Graham Tyler, who mounted his show like an exhibition in a Chelsea gallery, where he paired his artwork with his garments. This effectively built on his inspirations: the American assemblage artist Joseph Cornell and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book, The Little Prince.
Tyler, 26, is a would-be academic and self-described “maker” who landed on fashion as his vehicle of expression after a creative journey that began in high school when he worked for a lamp maker. Building upon his interest in metalwork, he started to study painting and sculpture in Cleveland, but left school to apprentice with a milliner there. His tutelage completed, Tyler moved to New York, where he made hats for Ralph Lauren and Brandon Maxwell, then at Haus of Gaga, while working in reception at Equinox to make ends meet.
It was Adam Selman who encouraged Tyler to make clothes of his own design, which he started to do after teaching himself how to sew. After some trial and error, the designer launched his namesake brand. It is built around the idea of curating archives, meaning that each season Tyler aims to let his collection “more so be the artifacts from my research and less so about just making clothes.” In this way Tyler is walking the line between art, which he defines as pieces made with “intention,” and fashion. “I think that when you want to make work that people care about,” Tyler says, “making things that people have on their person helps them to connect much easier than to things that they just hang on the wall.”
