10 Designer Spotlights: Past and Present
DSMNY Newcomers, Archive Corners, & the Sustainable
After almost six months in New York City and four since my last designer spotlight, I have accumulated a long laundry list of new designers. They are local to the city, or perhaps its department stores, or perhaps the Vogue runway notifications of its fashion nerds. They spring excitedly from the mouths of their partners or designers or slip out during discussions of new purchases.
Consider this list a relatively broad sampling of new discoveries, half from the last two weeks and the other from months of these endless recorded names picked at random.
Duran Lantink
Who is capitalizing on the archive? The act of reedition, reference, and replication by major brands reflects an understanding of the archive’s worth and obsessive pull. Ultimately though these brands misunderstand that that pull is strongest for the actual original garments being referenced. This is why when I visited Dries Van Noten’s Los Angeles store and found samples and runway pieces for sale, I rejoiced at a designer 1) making use of unused clothes, 2) opening their archives, and 3) making used clothes feel as desirable and current as new ones. Still, this concept is localized to one store, a relatively low investment in a very real “archive fever”.
On Duran Lantink’s website is a curious button titled “How to own Duran Lantink“. click it, and you will be led here:
Economically, Duran Lantink assumes control of every stage of the archive process, from original sale, authentication, and resale via direct purchase or auction. He cuts out every other middleman in the process, making his site a hub for all of his garments - old and new. He allows each garment to be tracked by a history of alterations and owners, and transforms year-old shows into active sites of discourse and experience. This structure does more than establish provenance, it prefigures an endlessness to these garments.
And what of the garments? At Dover Street Market New York, where Lantink’s work is now for sale, you can find them hung between Melitta Baumeister and Vaquera. It’s an apt location - There’s a club-ready mentality to the sexiness of these clothes, a studied experimentalism to their bulbous shapes or sheer hangings, a shared love of art and trash married in an unknown logic. Lantink’s invoking of body archives is more than academic mumbo jumbo - it shows up in the inversions, the drooping fabrics and inflated tops, and the oddball fetish wear. In some shows, models style themselves. Some shows are Frankenstein creations of clashing luxury logos like an un-tailored Dapper Dan. Other shows are not shows at all, just one-off clothing drops or zines containing photography of an “imaginary“ show (nonetheless photographed and designed by Lantink). With his breadth, his structure, and his growth into wholesale, Duran Lantink feels like the future.
Ponte
It’s a lazy afternoon at Dover Street Market last month. In the silver hardware of lacy Chopova Lowena bombers, one can see women poking at the new Miu Miu, avoiding the Balenciaga, ignorant to the new Comme sub-label offerings across the room. Here, on a subsection of the women’s and avant club gay designer floor (a Rick Owens bust sits on all fours by a mirror), Is where much of DSM’s newness lies.
When I visit, it’s in the form of a regular seeming pair of vintage washed denim. The first surprise is an ivory elasticized waistband from a vintage jockstrap. Not totally surprising, I think at this point all of us have seen denim with an adjustable waist. The second surprise is that the low placement of the waistband suggests the folding of the jeans over the waist, provocatively unbuttoned, oversized, yet comfortable at the waist. There are iterations with a denim skirt as well. This is Ponte.
Ponte is new to DSM, But Pontefract’s work began with Harry Pontefract opening the 2016 Central Saint Martins graduate show alongside a class of Kiko Kostadinov and John Alexander Skelton. Afterward, Pontefract worked for Loewe during arguably its greatest rise to fame (some of the material trompe l'œil and draping dresses in Loewe can also be found in Ponte). Ponte was launched with a similar vision to this initial show, creating sexy deconstructionist pieces with deadstock and the discarded. Pontefract describes the concept of Ponte through the idea “that the pieces can be collected, worn, and exhibited.” as “textile sculptures“. Ponte’s sometimes cheap materials lie in contrast with both this concept - there are limited numbers of each design - and studied couture silhouettes. In this sense, Ponte’s natural approach to creating limited and storied work out of old materials makes their sustainability and enticing strangeness all the more interesting.
Ponte garments sit in these pantheons of designer wares waiting to be found and crowded by its own adherents. I am certainly a new one.
Hodakova
There is a similar ethos behind the recomposition techniques of Hodokova and Ponte, but Hodokova’s are playfully literal. A skirt is composed of a pair of men’s trousers, the waist serving as the hem, then a vest is made with the same ethos. There are more conservative patchwork jeans and asymmetrical tee shirts, and dresses collaged with bras or stockings for the Margiela fans and freaks.
Hodakova’s difference is both its Swedish locale, and its discovery of a hit: the belt bag. Hodakova’s belt buckle studded baguettes, elegant buckets, and collaborative Gucci iterations call back to a big belt early aughts grunge period being seized upon by today’s fashionable. Hodakova plays off the sustainability angle far more than Ponte, inserting itself into accessible spaces like SSENSE, runway circuits, and ultimately, the Gucci boardroom.
Before the belts and the fanfare and the Dover Street Market contract (Hodakova and Ponte are also neighbors there), the brand was started by Ellen Hodakova Larsson in Sweden in 2019, her first show a digital pandemic era lookbook. Even then her clothes are of the moment, a Juergen Teller for Balenciaga candidness showing club kids in daylight. Still, these are not broad or commercial garments by any means. Hodakova’s garments are shown on major runway stages, yet are unseasonal in their oddity like a black Comme skirt or Yohji balloon pants. While expressive and odd, this early lookbook reminds us that these designs are decidedly not as precious, not as much “art“ as Ponte. These are truly sustainable pieces for an oxymoronic, yet decidedly futuristic, fashion stripped of seasonality.
Niccolò Pasqualetti
Niccolò Pasqualetti is a designer who seemed to simply appear. One moment I’d never heard of them, next they were popping up as a large (and unexpectedly online) buy at Dover Street Market. Pasqualetti was an intern at The Row, another old figure at Loewe, and thus there is a sense of the refined via the unexpected, alongside an expertise in engineering and remixing the commercial. His leather jacket is not the one you might picture when you think of endless versatility, but it serves the purpose. Tops are highlighted by fur, a longish cut, or a bronzed color. Pants may be a bit wide and more structured than expected. These are pieces that straddle ubiquity and the niche, they are beautiful, they are dazzling in the way fine pottery or a greasy meal made clean and fresh. There is something similar to Pasqualetti’s recent work akin to that of Phoebe Philo’s solo work - the crafting of luxurious, singular, small batch garments both totally separate from yet inevitably speaking to the commercial fashion space. With this comparison in mind, Pasqualetti is primed for the quiet luxury era.
But these are Pasqualetti’s clothes as seen online or on the racks. His shows are far more fantastical, displaying wide and billowing silhouettes that feel strangely solid, not sloppy or drooping, as well as deconstructed. His looks can range from sharply exaggerated tailoring to a rustic, sculptural quality akin to the Meier’s work at Jil Sander. It is these tinges of oddness mixed with the mainstream that made Pasqualetti a no-brainer semi-finalist for the LVMH prize.
Natal Designs
Natal Designs was showcased in Nepenthes New York last month, partially because the brand was started by a designer also known for working with Nepenthes collaborator Nanga, but also because of their unique niche of 70s and 80s camping and mountaineering Americana. Natal carries fleeces in deep purples, cardigans in loud patterns muted by washes and manipulation, and baggy pants with abundant pockets.
While Natal has been around since 1999, its output is sometimes more irregular, only recently growing more active (particularly in the clothing space). Appropriately, these are clothes that do not push the “coolness“ or old fashioned technicality of vintage finds in the way brands like South2 West8 or Mountain Research do. These clothes have a dated charm, a light funkiness, and a relation to the unpretentious yet storied technical.
Archivio J M Ribot
Some brands accept the limitations of their cult. To broaden or simplify the visions of these worlds makes no sense: they are fundamentally uncommercial projects. This is what makes these niches succeed, a commitment to making uncompromising oddities. I don’t know many people searching for Japanese linen shirts in dusty florals, nor anyone looking for papery oddly buttoned cropped blazers with patchwork flowers. These people, who wish to look like antique Victorian rogues, often turn to Archivio J M Ribot.
Don’t let the antique aesthetic or tailoring focuses fool you; Archivio J M Ribot is similarly designed around small batch sustainably made pieces from a small scale to niche retailers and etailers. The brand divides itself into two collections: “riforma, consisting of one-of-a-kind pieces created by combining antique parts of clothing from early 20th century, and archivio, a series of limited edition garments made with ancient fabrics collected in an textile archive throughout the years”. The results are similar and equally marked by what seems like centuries of age despite a modern sensibility and irony. One wears these garments not necessarily as an earnest costume of the past but as a high-concept mode of translating the past to the future.
The uninitiated will be delighted to know that Archivio J M Ribot is one of a handful of near-anonymous European designers creating arcane, pricey, limited Victoriana. The niche in Ribot’s work is his commitment to recreation via antique fabrics, as well as a sumptuousness in rich textures and colors. There are often warm florals or deep maroons in the brand’s work, alongside the occasionally ragged seeming fur collar or vest. Even a white blazer will be cut with a sharper, more elevated cut than the sometimes more purposefully ragged iterations by Paul Harnden or John Alexander Skelton.
Red or Dead
Founders and designers of Red or Dead Gerardine and Wayne Hemingway appear in the Alexander Mcqueen documentary and biography, yet neither pays much attention to the designs of the brand which briefly included England’s prodigal design son in its ranks. The brand began with Wayne and Geraldine buying and selling vintage clothing, designing and selling Dr Martens, until finally opening Red or Dead in the mid 80s as a London High Street store. The movement into clothing came soon after, but unlike other designers and stores in this arena, Red or Dead remained defiantly by and for the street. As Wayne Hemingway describes in the mission statement for the brand: "At Red or Dead our mission is to produce challenging clothing at an affordable price on a nonelitist level. We want fashion and high fashion for everybody."
Runway design followed this concept of affordability and “nonelitism“. Here was a goofy, brash, colorful, exaggerated style of Camden flea markets and dress up. It was Moschino Cheap & Chic without class, baby Gaultier, a middle school Seditionaries (the gall of a 50 pound tee shirt there inspired the brand). Their shows were sexy, in bad taste, and scattered. Some were outright offensive, others were startlingly modern. There are bits of Westwood and Mcqueen in Red or Dead, yet where those designers grew up, the Hemingways started working with Marks & Spencer and helping with promo for Trainspotting.
There aren’t many collectors of Red or Dead I know of. Their work is cheap and scattered online, either due to quality, lack of notoriety, or both. Finding their visuals, their runway pieces, and their prints (the Victoria & Albert Museum has a few) presents a fairly modern concept of the streetwear currently flourishing that rejects fashion, embraces youth obsession with footwear and accessories (and its crossover into popular culture), and uses the medium of fashion to shock and challenge its infrastructures. Red or Dead shares the philosophy of a modern brand like Point/Hodokova, that the abundance of clothing discarded by society can be used to challenge its concept of beauty, usefulness, and power. The difference is that the very cheapness and ubiquitousness that made Red or Dead disappear is what keeps it in the realm of the discarded.
Xuly.Bët
I like to imagine what it must’ve been like exiting the grand theatrics of a Jean Paul Gaultier show in 90s Paris, all the energy of ironic flamboyance clashing head first into the earnest frenzy of a second runway show outside. There may be a stretchy bias cut dress in strips of tee shirts, bold red and black text enlarged like a blocky futurist etch, and slinky jerseys in flashing colors. Xuly.Bët didn’t always present their runway shows outside the Gaultier tents of Paris Fashion Week, but when they did I can only imagine how they amazed.
Xuly.Bët was started by designer Lamine Kouyaté, who landed in Paris from Mali and began building an alternative empire built on the sustainable reuse of garments, bright colors, sportswear inversions, and unapologetic distance from fashion normativity. Brands love to historicize their involvements and apparent “longtime“ commitments to now important issues like diversity and sustainability - Xuly.Bët was there first. Xuly.Bët was an early collaborator with Puma in an era where high concept sportswear-fashion mergers were sparse if not nonexistent. These were shows that celebrated African aesthetics and practices, that experimented in reuse and reconstruction in an era that was often halfhearted, blithely racist, or calculating in their attempts.
Xuly.Bët also existed in era where being fringe could be punishing. Xuly.Bët stopped consistently producing shows in the early 2000s before relaunching his brand in 2020 when the fashion industry had finally caught up with his vision. As journalist Dana Thomas frames his rise and fall, “You could be poor and be a fashion designer back then… [this] is a concept that doesn't exist anymore because of the corporatization of the industry and the globalization of the industry, and the polish of the industry.” Still, Xuly.Bët is now the contemporary of a whole new cast of sustainable designers working in the shadows of contemporary enfants terrible, each taking on an even more vicious and globally competitive industry. For all of their new hardships and difficulties, their success is run great part thanks to the spectacles and experiments of Xuly.Bët.
NN07
Is Carmy’s $650 Jacket From The Bear Worth It? The jacket in question, brought to public attention by Youtuber James Leung (also reviewer of Carmy’s oft described Merz B Schwannen shirts) is by Copenhagen brand NN07. NN07 offers traditionally inspired heightened basics, each with their own degree of fussy detailed pivot. The mohair zip up Carmy wore may be a bit longer, the color blocking of the patchwork asynchronous in just the right way to reference faded vintage. Here, the point is a feigned ignorance to any of this - it is first and foremost worn.
Important for me to note: I discovered NN07 not on the silver screen, but on the racks of minimalist looking stores selling hyperspecific menswear (an “I’m not like other girls“ moment if ever there was one). NN07 can be found in European boutiques and these beautifully fussy American shops for polished workwear, or in larger department stores like Saaks or Bloomingdales peddling elevated basics. The Nordic minimalism of NN07 functions simultaneously as Art and as an object to forget and wear.
The Bear becomes an effective intertext for NN07 by juxtaposing the brand with a Merz B Schwannen, that is, a statement through fabric and cut about what a “perfect basic“ entails. This is a bar to be measured both by the obsessives of these garments and to be bought mindlessly by one who doesn’t care yet wants perfection. Ultimately, NN07 is fascinating not because its garments represent a unanimous concept of perfection, but because it is one of the few who attempt this project at all.
Ripvanwinkle by Naoki Shiratani and Masao Ono
The archive community is a strange one. There is a side to this world enamored with one-upmanship, with the arcane for its own sake, and for increasingly inaccessible and sometimes mythic information. The archive has been opened. Gargantuan cultural figures pull five-figure Raf Simons pieces for music videos, and Undercover’s show becomes one of 2023’s most viewed. In response, those adjacent to the adjacent to the adjacent are growing as new communicators of wealth, knowledge, and style. To those already turned to the past, “newness” emerges from obscurity. This is where Naoki Shiratani and Masao Ono‘s Ripvanwinkle is situated: a brand celebrated for
Ripvanwinkle is known for mixing subcultural chic with utility and craft. Leather jackets are in skinny cuts, denim with scratchy claw mark fades or deep dyes, and faded black tee shirts with pixelated pornography. It’s as if the dark Americana of Number (N)ine never blew up and gestated as a Harajuku cult of scraggly leather and whiskering denim bellbottoms in black and earth tones. Here is a more rustic world - something less precious and hyped. It reflects the fascinating damages imbued in Americana - the similarities in stretched tee, raw leather, and asymmetric tee - all under the shadow of a slightly heightened sense of mythos. Rip Van Winkle is a larger-than-life tale of a misty eyed American past, a past these garments echo and warp with such startling elegance.
LISTINGS
I’ve compiled some brief listings of the above designers of some current favorite pieces available! Brace for occasionally insane pricing, but most in limited numbers and deep extravagance. Enjoy!