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On the way to the Sandy Liang show, in a medical library on the Upper East Side, I had one of those funny-but-depressing thoughts, which is that fashion week is one of the only, if not the only, cultural events singularly dedicated to what women want. Twice a year, on the dot, designers ask women: Do you want this? Do you want to be this person? How can I help you be who you want to be, or express what you need to say? Does this make you feel cool, pretty, unique, safe? And when a woman is the one doing the designing, it’s also one of the few moments when women are asked, without interruption, to tell us what they think.
Maybe that’s why there’s a uniquely New York (say it three times fast!) phenomenon of female-led fashion brands with passionate fanbases. Brands like Rodarte, Sandy Liang, Collina Strada, and Puppets and Puppets put on shows peopled not merely with celebrity supporters dressed by dealmaker stylists, but bonafide fans, who want to live their lives in the worlds of these designers.
It’s the kind of thing that would be unthinkable in Europe. Sure, Yohji Yamamoto and Rick Owens shows are packed with customers (and you could say that couture shows are the same phenomenon on a one-percenter level), but these people form a community around the designers rather than a mere customer base. They are friends, or friends of friends, of the person or team making the clothes, and attach themselves to the labels like other people are attached to football teams or bands. They help interpret their fantasies and idealized world, and make their wearers feel seen. It helps that each of them has a distinctive value system, from the Rodarte’s bleeding-heart romanticism to Collina Strada’s insistently eco-conscious approach to everything from the shows themselves to the production of the clothes.
It’s almost like the garments and products these designers make are the merch for their modus operandi. (That makes these things the best-designed merch in the world!) Carrying a Puppets and Puppets bag with that hyper-real cookie on the front, or wearing one of Collina Strada’s highly recognizable slip dresses, shows that you align with one of a series of the city’s fashion micro-niches.
Rodarte, the punk-poetic brand led by sisters Laura and Kate Mulleavy, sells fantastic golden age of cinema slipdresses and gowns for upwards of $2000 on Net-a-Porter and Moda Operandi. Which is to say: their appeal is wide. But the sensibility is so specific, and their front row on Friday afternoon was packed with celebrities and personalities wearing the clothes—a lineup I could have predicted, which I don’t mean in a negative way, but a heartwarming one. It’s more that people like Tavi Gevinson, Natasha Lyonne, and Jemima Kirke tell us where pieces like a beaded ’60ish mint green top and matching bell-hemmed pants belong in the world.
Many of the clothes were Rodarte-isms we’ve seen before, like black dresses with dramatic trumpet hems and Morticia Addams sleeves, made from cheesecloth that tattered on the runway as the women walked. Clothes for women who know it sometimes feels good to cry! They even recreated their famous cobweb knits from Fall 2008. But again, a brand like Rodarte has a fanbase that expects the designers to play some of the hits, and introduce something new. The newness came from lovely prints covered in faeries drawn by the designers’ mother, which looked especially great on a large cape dress trimmed with neon tulle.
Collina Strada Fall 2023 RTW
After that, it was a skip over the bridge to Collina Strada, where you can never tell if designer Hillary Taymour’s friends—Hari Nef, Tommy Dorfman, Ella Emhoff, Aaron Rose Philip—will appear on the runway or in the audience. Many of those who did appear on the runway wore incredibly detailed animal makeup by the genius Isamaya Ffrench. The message is that humans and animals are much more closely connected than we imagine.
I loved her lime and green leopard-ish print pants and top with lace trim; model of the moment Alva Claire in a gooey, webby minidress; and a sharp-mint suit with floral embroidery at the hem. If you didn’t like the masks, that’s your problem, because the ever-growing number of Collina acolytes totally get it. (Though in the back of my mind, I wonder what a Collina show would look like with a few of the theatrical layers peeled back, to reveal to an audience larger than those simply in the know that she could be New York’s answer to Dries Van Noten, making really beautiful and romantic printed pieces that gel together season after season….)
“Definitely the atmosphere feels very enthusiastic,” Taymour told me, but it was something that built up over time. “Progressively we started being more performative in the show space,” by performing spoken word, or mounting a farmer’s market on the runway, or even just instructing her models to wiggle their fingers as they walk, as she did last season. The audience often screams the models’ names, she said.
The scene of the Collina and Rodarte shows shared something tenderly nerdy—a bit o’ cosplay couture, with the animal makeup at Collina and the fairy wings and drawings (done by the Mulleavys’ mother) at Rodarte. Not every person who buys clothing wants to look like an art world dealmaker (Proenza, The Row), or someone who’s read all of Rachel Cusk’s books like seven times (Rachel Comey, Toogood), or just really hot and sexy and cool (Khaite, Tory Burch). What about those who grew up wearing animal ears to middle school gym class, or filling notebooks with drawings of anime? Or just connects intuitively to the feeling and vision of the Mulleavys or Taymour?
Anna Sui Fall 2023 RTW
This was the spirit of 1990s New York, when you had brands like Ghost or Susan Cianciolo’s RUN making stuff for their friends. (Or, in the case of Cianciolo, the designer made clothes with their friends.) Anna Sui is a great example, though of course her friends were Madonna and Mick Jagger. (Hot.) But she pioneered a feeling of feminine intimacy through whippy little slipdresses and babydoll shapes worn with a lipsticked sneer, and her show on Saturday evening, at a teensy bar in the East Village, reminded me of that attitude. Don’t try to dress some imagined muse, or the whole world—instead, focus on dressing the people who are your friends. They are your friends, after all, because they’re creative, influential, and want to change the world.
“I wanted to throw a party,” Sui told me after the show, as Sofia Coppola, Marc Jacobs, and Jane Holzer lingered nearby, waiting to say hello. A number of her looks, like the slipdresses but also the rabbit-ear hats, are archival items that customers have been asking for, and which she decided to recreate. (Thank God the stigma around designers dipping into their own archives has evaporated. If a piece is truly good, it is as good now as it was then! Why not give the people what they want instead of forcing them to hunt down price-gouged vintage!) Others, like a tweedy jacket with yarn trim, or a white blousy denim suit studded with colorful gems a la Nudie Cohn, looked just great.
Sandy Liang Fall 2023 RTW
At the moment, the most dedicated fanbase in town may be Sandy Liang. If you’re keyed into the Liang universe, you know how rabid it is, but if you don’t, you may think of her as the woman behind those great fleeces a few years ago. At her show Saturday morning, I saw countless twenty-somethings in her apron dresses with little lace ups, and minidresses with Peter Pan collars, and big bows and ballet flats. (It was a funny contrast to the Proenza show an hour later, where millennial and Gen X editors slothed around in sweatshirts and jeans, with expensive boots and little shearling coats.) The Sandy customer loves femininity, even as she looks askance at gender roles and identity, and the runway show felt like a catalog for those superfans. She hews a bit too close at times to predecessors like Simone Rocha and Miu Miu, but her customer is unflappable about that sort of thing. (Her shoppers might even be keyed into dupe culture on TikTok, where users attempt to find copies of runway looks they love.)
The Liang customer is a person who has…not main character energy, but runway finale energy. Their daily life living in New York is a catwalk, a performance of fashion novelty and theatricality through which they must walk in the most stylized, fashionable way. The goal is to look editorial, polished, plugged in. The exquisiteness of your outfit reflects a learnedness about contemporary fashion and style.
It’s interesting that these brands geared toward younger customers are so precise, together. Is it a rebuke to those slovenly millennials, or is there something subversive about dressing up for basically nothing? Carly Mark’s brand Puppets & Puppets had lots of little red sequin cocktail dresses and faux fur coats belted with layers of clear tape. Clearly, some of her audience had been invited to dress in last season’s Eyes Wide Shut-inspired goodies, although many were just nerding out in seasons past, like dog tapestry barn jackets and shoes with cracked eggs on the toe.
Mark’s surrealist clothes appeal to a group who thinks of clothing winkingly as art, in the sense that art is just as much a corporate eyeroll as fashion can be. She’s like Jonathan Anderson, if he were still small enough to be making haha-knitwear and pants-on-hangers-as-necklaces just for his friends, instead of the global audience he commands at an LVMH brand.
Puppets and Puppets Fall 2023 RTW
Rachel Tashjian is the Fashion News Director at Harper’s Bazaar, working across print and digital platforms. Previously, she was GQ’s first fashion critic, and worked as deputy editor of GARAGE and as a writer at Vanity Fair. She has written for publications including Bookforum and Artforum, and is the creator of the invitation-only newsletter Opulent Tips.
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