10 Designers I Discovered Last Month
British Gorpcore, Hermetic Shoemakers, & Missing Links of Archive History
The benefit of moving to a new city without long-term lodgings or employment is the opportunity to wander. This is particularly easy in New York, with its tidy districts for free galleries, endless designer boutiques, and high density of cheap (but never cheap enough) samosas, beef patties, and bagels to propel my journies. After two months, I have an apartment and a jobs, but the meantime has yielded incredible discoveries.
New York City holds a wealth of fashion niches that I have only begun to unravel for myself. In my wanderings, here are 10 designers I’ve begun learning about and putting on my radar.
Paul Harnden Shoemaker “SOMEWHERE IN BRIGHTON…”
In England, there is a group of vaguely linked fashion separatists crafting esoteric Victorian skewed garments from premium cloth. Each designer holds a different relationship to anonymity and exclusivity, designers like John Alexander Skelton’s shows can be found on Vogue runway, Elena Dawson’s cannot, yet both can be found in select Dover Street Markets. They are in the corner at the Los Angeles store, a strange, seemingly rarely visited appendage offering odd shirts with Victorian prints, wrinkled ankle-long coats, and Peter Pan collars at the cost of a washer-dryer.
Paul Harden is the most anonymous of this group. He lives by the sea, unreachable, anonymous, content. He does no press, does not release his clothing for photoshoots, and does not give interviews. In New York, his clothes hang among Skelton’s, Kawakubo’s, Owens’, and Yamamoto’s at IfSoho. They stand out. His shoes have brilliant upturned toes, his coats billow, and his prints are fantastical. As often as his work is described as Dickensian, it seems more akin to some imagined and perfected fantasy of the past. His work is difficult to dilute or express in an image or conversation - you feel it and understand completely what it offers. When styleZeitgeist founder Eugene Rabkin asked about a Paul Harden coat Wim Wenders was wearing once, he shot back a dirty look and retorted ‘You know we’re not supposed to talk about this.’
Toogood “THE COCOON OF A PERSON“
Scattered among the next-chic-brand section at Dover Street or the precious slow fashion auteurs in your favorite luxury boutique, you may find Toogood’s analog logo peeking out at you framed by a wide leg or a thin collar. For all of the brand’s seemingly laser focus on garment-making, Faye Toogood got her start in furniture design and interior decorating, while Erica Toogood was a Saville Row pattern cutter. If there is a similarity between Toogood’s lauded design work and its much less discussed clothing, it’s the harnessing of the most utilitarian aspects of the old, classic, or antique to construct an almost minimalist futurism. The brand started when in 2013, The Toogoods worked on an installation for the 2013 London Design Festival which displayed 49 coats, each labeled with the historic trade it was worn by and for. The project recalls August Sander’s photographs (one of Yohji Yamamoto’s favorite references) which display the utilitarianism and garment specificity required of late 19th-century vocations, their minute differences, and required exaggerations.
As much as Toogood reacts to the power of the utilitarian uniform, its use of choice materials are as much a site of its deconstruction. The fabrics of each Toogood piece are meticulously sourced from predominantly UK-based suppliers, or through nearby European manufacturing so long as emissions remain net zero and quality is retained. This means while some pieces, like a photographer’s coat with bottomless pockets, a long fisherman’s coat in crinkly brown patent leather, or a stocky and cropped chef’s pant speak for themselves, Toogood denim took years of tinkering with price points and manufacturing.
Boboutic “AN ENDLESS LINE”
When an intense focus is directed at one garment, brilliant things can happen. For the Italian brand Boboutic, that garment is the knit - knits which take the form of simple seeming coats and frocks with hypnotically soft and textured forms. Boboutic has been experimenting in this realm since 2000, and they are a perfect example of a brand that functions best when one can see the incredible materials and construction that make these wavy monochromatic coats pop on a clothing rack. Boboutic sees each knit as a precious objet d’art, a medium ripe with meaning, an endless line of yarn with which to reconfigure a million different ways.
For a brand so niche in scope, Boboutic is sensationally art-directed. Formed as a collaboration between designer Michel Bergamo and photographer Cristina Zamagni, the brand imagines continuous collaborations with artists and filmmakers for each collection - imbuing their work with a diverse, refined, ever-shifting aesthetic footing. Models in lookbooks emerge in their peacoats among digitally collaged static, multiplied tenfold, or shot blurry and overexposed in the woods. It is deeply gratifying to see a brand as artisan in scope and practice as Boboutic devoting the time and energy they do to these collaborative works, each a digital reinterpretation of a new host of cozy and perfect knits.
Uma Wang “A SIP OF WINE IN FRONT OF THE AMAZON FOREST”
Usually, the most obvious or iconic person on a list like this makes its way embarrassingly to the middle. This is if it is not triumphantly placed at the bottom, or perched at the top as if to say “duh”. Uma Wang was an embarrassing gap in my knowledge until recently. She’s been active since the launch of her label in 2005, gaining prominence in the early 2010s at a time when there were no Asian women showing at international fashion weeks. Wang is a testament to the power of archive/avant fashion as a force spurred and enlivened by globalism - born in China, a Central Saint Martins grad, producing her work in Italy to show between London, Paris, Milan, and then back in Shanghai. However, unlike the modern indie brands that populate SSENSE in a show of false global ubiquity, Uma Wang’s clothing is sold by less than 100 retailers, 15 of which are in China. This is work that is bought and sold, and has lasted, thanks to its ability to be seen and felt.
Wang has a sensational eye for patterns, all of them dusty and luxurious like tapestries behind museum glass, and has a wonderful ability to apply those prints to gigantic coats, silky shirts, and ballooning pants. These prints often juxtapose sheer silks and durable tunics, long dresses and blazers with hanging straps. What makes Wang’s clothing, and her runways, so effortlessly consistent is perhaps the way these garments are styled. Each look seems to feature just the right jewelry, the perfect pairing of silhouettes, and a sense of tactile refinement. There is nothing about Uma Wang’s work that feels hollow or costume-ish: it is real. Her clothing finds realistic spaces for the deconstructed to exist unpretentiously and elegantly. This is not true of every designer’s iteration of a flowing floral coat.
Bárbara Sánchez-Kane “DISRUPT THE RITUAL & RHYTHM OF DRESS”
I wandered into a gallery in Chelsea recently, curious about a kinky, Comme Des Garcons-reminiscent chest plate of molded black leather and silvery buckles. Later I found photographs of these leather pieces in deep scarlet perched on naked bodies, turning models into 19th century flying instruments or biblically accurate winged angels of bondage. Also among this exhibit were loafers studded with purse closures, suits in chemical blue hues with crisscrossing lapels that seem to penetrate each other, and clotheslines carrying dripping silvery figures encased in styrofoam. While this diverse work would already justify Bárbara Sánchez-Kane as a versatile designer, this show was but one era of many.
Barbara Sánchez-Kane’s runway presentations are very different from these carefully composed sculpture garments. They are sexy, political, funny, and strange - if Walter Van Bierendonck minored in gender studies. Sánchez-Kane focuses this sharp wit on the Mexican hierarchies of gender, religion, and military power she was born within. Pearls swirl in twisted stiff shapes, decorating thorny crowns and cropped church outfits on one runway, another has blue satin suits that twist into roses at the breast, and (my personal favorite) a man in a white blouse with white straps forming a frozen writhing figure at the navel all drawing the eye to meet a set of fuzzy red dice that hang at the model’s barely concealed crotch. One could spend hours just describing these audaciously complex garments - they are that enticing. Sánchez-Kane’s work has all the intentionality, sporadic creation, and artisanship of her fellow sculpture designers with their gallery runways and preciousness, but loaded with politics, sex, and snazz.
_j.L-la-l_ “SYNTHESIZING THE FUTURE”
For a name as hard to google or remember as _j.L-la-l_, the UK brand has been consistently appearing in the stock of high-end retailers like SSENSE and Slam Jam. I learned about the brand not through its product pages, but in a recent Sabukaru interview with two noted UK gorp and techwear enthusiasts. Their collections of 1990s and 2000s Oakley, Nike tracksuits, and relevant corners of CDG archive would look right at home in a _j.L-la-l_ ensemble.
These are garments constructed in highly technical fabrics and adorned with glorious paneling, asymmetrical zips, and high crops. The result is an everyman’s Kiko Kostadinov, or to others, a less experimental or fleshed-out iteration of the popular avante-gorp king. Regardless, their price points remain similarly steep. This author’s preferences aside, there’s something undeniably attractive about _j.L-la-l_’s minute tweaks and technical flares that make them seem like a utilitarian luxury. In a landscape saturated by the branded old gorp brands attempting to sneak back into relevancy through cheap reproduction, _j.L-la-l_ is a fresher voice.
Ashlyn “JUMP OFF THE RAIL AND HUG YOU”
While admiring the asymmetrical, antique-ish, raw cuts of one of Ashlynn Park’s garments, it may come as no surprise that she began by working as a pattern cutter for Yohji Yamamoto. Her work combines the fabric forward minimalism with odd yet ubiquitous cuts. Shirts balloon at the sleeves in a blouselike fashion, thick stormy coats lose their collars while others are accented with chalky color blocking. It’s not quite as precious or “perfect” as a Peter Do or Lemaire piece, yet seems constructed in a more considered way than some avante designers.
Park has no interest in selling museum “pieces.” While her prices are certainly still in the luxury department, they are not so extreme and inaccessible as Yamamoto or Do. These garments propose that the weirdly wonderful can be cherished and tended to as much as the more ubiquitous dress or trouser. Perhaps this is why the Met decided to purchase one of Park’s pieces for their permanent collection.
Shushu/Tong “MODERN HEROINES“
Shushu/Tong is another more obvious name on this list, but their amazing Shanghai Fashion Week show recently prompted a more intensified study. Formed in China by Liushu Lei and Yutong Jiang in 2015, the brand has a cult Genz Z following spurred by a hyperfeminine world of pastels, skirts, and bows exaggerated in gigantic proportions and chic cuts. The popularity of Shushu/Tong has led to no shortage of viral products and collaborations. Their work with Asics yielded a creamy colorway topped with a thick bow, while mainline shoes offer exaggerated prep school oxfords and brogues on platform heels, or ballerina flats resplendent with straps.
There’s a harmony in the way Shushu/Tong balances these motifs, allowing products that feel simultaneously bold, storied, and trendy, yet as easily wearable for a night out or morning class fit. This is best achieved while operating at its subtlest - like the slight change of a heel or the application of a cheerful floral to a dress. These moments sometimes get buried among the cashable bows and SSENSE ready flats, motifs that, in spite of their commerciality, seem fresh in the graphic flourishes of Shushu/Tong’s lookbooks.
Aitor Throup “MID-METAMORPHOSIS“
The utilitarian is not a monolith. It takes the shape of military wear, rigid materials, high end technical garb for maximum protection or flexing of legacy brands, and the protections offered by everyday brands in gigantic stores. Throughout his career, Aitor Throup has found a way to design for each category. Throup has worked with famed Italian gorp brands Stone Island and CP Company, served as creative director for G-Star RAW, designed unique sci-fi military garb for the Hunger Games Mockingjay films and Flying Lotus, and used his namesake brand to show modular and high-concept techwear. What unites this vast body of work is a commitment to minutely detailed sketches which illuminate the characters and costumes Throup sees through his garments. Most of these illustrations, many reminiscent of 90s cult artist James Jean, resemble strange transformations fusing beast, technology, and garment.
Throup’s garments are few and far between - he shows collections irregularly and has few stocklists for projects outside of his streetwear project TheDSA. Throup has an incredible ability to take silhouettes and garments long standardized like G-Star skinny jeans or Italian techwear and imbue them with landscapes of pockets and pleats or rough and sculptural white leather. His garments often have a stiffness both in their technicality and their relation to the body. As new conversations arise about the pervading subversiveness of skinny silhouettes and dated styles, Throup reminds us that beyond cyclical fashion cycles is a way of crafting silhouettes that are both timeless and futuristic.
VANDALIZE “LOST & FOUND”
Hironori Ichinose is not a contemporary designer. His presence on this list serves as a reminder of the names behind the names who empower and enliven designs behind flashier figureheads - and are thus sometimes lost to history. He also ends this list as a testament to the communities of studied left-of-center archive collectors and obsessives. At a popup, I had the privilege of meeting @unknownstore, who told me the story of a bizarre tee shirt by Undercover (a favorite designer of mine) featuring Bela Lugosi’s Dracula crisscrossed with bejeweled chains.
While at Bunka Fashion Academy Jun Takahashi formed his brand Undercover with his best friend, Hironori Ichinose. Ichinose was foundational to the brand’s early days, creating many of the Seditionaries-inspired graphics until the 90s. While Ichinose worked with Takahashi again in 2006 through his new brand VANDALIZE, the brand only remained active until the late 2000s. What remains of Ichinose legacy is fragmented - rare shirts, a legendary bomber jacket, an even more ephemeral early brand by Ichinose named “NWO“, and a handful of archivists who know his name and work. @unknownstore and @yourfashionarchive tracked Ichinose’s SS99 runway presentation for VANDALIZE, but little else exists of his work beyond those hidden behind dusty periodicals and sold Grailed items with broken links.
The work that remains is the foundation of shock and awe, early streetwear aesthetics, and punk reproductions that serve as Undercover’s modern foundation. Ichinose’s subtle changes to Takahashi’s garments, the tie-dyeing of a vulgar tee, or the beading of a velvety vampire shirt redefined and recontextualized their power. He is one of the few with the ability to adapt Undercover’s DNA as a collaborator rather than a blank canvas of motifs for Takahashi to adapt. He may be Jun Takahashi’s most unique, significant collaborator.