Photos: Fashion Fund: Pride of a Nation
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Photographed by Norman Jean Roy2/11Ohne Titel
For Alexa Adams (right) and Flora Gill (photographed with actress Brooklyn Decker overlooking the 9/11 Memorial), the experience of their label Ohne Titel (“no title” in German) is a multisensory one. “We like to play with something deeply textural, something you can almost see with your hands,” Gill says, stroking one of their sculptural knits (she produces all of the swatches and samples on her home knitting machine). Adams, 32, and Gill, 31, hailing from Washington, D.C., and Upstate New York, respectively, met at Parsons, reconnected several years later at Karl Lagerfeld, and launched their line of handiwork-meets-sleek silhouettes in 2006. Their spring collectsion is an edited tableau of bold prints and sumptuous rounded shoulders and shapes, complementing their ideal of seasonless, layered dressing.
Fashion Editor: Lawren Howell.
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy3/11Suno
When asked how often they travel for work, Suno designers Max Osterweis, 37, and Erin Beatty, 32 (photographed with actress Yaya DaCosta), reply with a collectsive chuckle (answer: seven months out of the year for Osterweis). Such is the daily grind when you are one-half of a line created in the hopes of building sustainable employment in Kenya; Suno has since extended its reach to India (beading and embroidery) and Peru (knits). The aesthetic of the brand, which first transfixed the fashion world with its repurposed African kanga prints, has similarly shifted. “We will always pay homage to that,” says Beatty, “but to be respected in the creative community, you have to constantly evolve.” That means blown-up microscope cellular-image patterns to rich black-and-white embroidery to oversize eyelet lace for spring.
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy4/11Fenton/Fallon
Dana Lorenz’s two jewelry brands—Fenton and Fallon—speak to different customers yet share the same core tenets. Fallon is Jan to Fenton’s Marcia—the younger, more unruly sibling trying to break out from her glossy sister’s shadow—but in an alternate Brady universe where Jan wears biker chains and Versace minis and Marcia commands the ballroom of the Waldorf with her rabble-rousing statement necklace. “The common thread is that she’s a strong woman who understands reference and direction and wants to stand out.” The 37-year-old self-taught jewelry designer (photographed with model Charlotte Free) cut her fashion teeth at Donna Karan and Gucci before creating Fenton in 2005, followed two years later—upon popular demand—by the lower-priced, punk-rock Fallon. Both lines’ bound chokers and multilayered strands (think tangles of pearls spiked with raw metal) are studies in subversive sparkle.
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy5/11Cushnie et Ochs
“It’s as if toddler Carly and toddler Michelle met and are playing house,” Michelle Ochs (center) explains during a tour of her Barbie-splashed inspiration board for Cushnie et Ochs’ spring collectsion. In fashion-industry years, the 27-year-olds (photographed with model Karlie Kloss) are toddlers, albeit extremely precocious ones. With their sharply tailored dresses in ladylike yet seductive silhouettes, the Parsons graduates have created a label that speaks to a wide definition of the modern woman. “We have a diverse age range in terms of our customer, but she’s definitely that sexier woman,” explains Carly Cushnie. “Sophisticated, quite striking; she wants to look like a woman—that’s the biggest thing.”
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy6/11Pamela Love
As a girl, Pamela Love (photographed with singer-songwriter Joanna Newsom) wanted to be a painter, writer, rock star, astrophysicist, archaeologist, clothing designer, sculptress—“everything apart from a movie star!” And in a way, the 29-year-old creator of bewitching and talismanic jewels—such as the small tribal spike necklace she wears every day, which has become one of her best-known motifs—has succeeded in becoming all of the above. Love’s burgeoning brand of eldritch glamour is created in the studio and workshop she inhabits on Manhattan’s West Twenty-ninth Street (with a little help from a Diamond District lapidary). She would like to open a store one day, but for now she’s focused on growing her brand and ramping up production: “As much as I love to make jewelry, I love to make jobs.”
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy7/11Finn Cheap Replica Handbags
It’s said a love knot is forever, and for Soraya Silchenstedt, it kind of is. The 32-year-old designer of Finn Cheap Replica Handbags (photographed with model Lakshmi Menon) originally discovered the motif in Mr. Rubin’s third-grade jewelry-making class and has since re-created it in solid gold. The Westchester-raised designer, who draws every design in pencil and gouache, also creates bulbous hearts and animal- and shark’s-tooth pendants—bijous with humor and heft. “That’s what makes the pieces iconic,” says business partner Candice Pool, 34, “that there are these themes in fine jewelry. Our clients are looking for something whimsical but still valuable.” This season, the label debuts a collectsion of engagement and wedding rings. “The details are very subtle,” says Silchenstedt, “but there’s reasoning to it.”
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy8/11Altuzarra
“A lot of it came from sport,” explains Joseph Altuzarra, holding a bonded leather top inspired by hockey uniforms from his spring collectsion. “It started with the idea of how to take the functionality of fall into spring.” The 27-year-old, Paris-born designer (photographed here with, from left, Claire Courtin-Clarins, Lauren Santo Domingo, and cousin Lily Kwong) understands the tastes of the modern metropolitan woman whose 24-hour-racecourse lifestyle demands a wardrobe that keeps pace. His signature: “A mix of something very sexy and something very utilitarian as well.”
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy9/11Creatures of the Wind
When Shane Gabier (right) and Chris Peters started dating, three years ago, they began making clothes together, too. “I don’t think it would work without us being together in life,” says Gabier, 37, one of the Chicago-based pair behind Creatures of the Wind (photographed here with model Abbey Lee Kershaw). The label’s quirky folk-punk-feminine aesthetic evokes Heathcliff and Catherine on the moors in a Japanese Manga retelling of the Brontë tale infused with splashes of psychedelia. “It’s a bit of the refusal of elegance,” says Peters, 27. “It’s kind of romantic and a little subversive.” Meeting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Gabier is still a professor in the Fashion Department, Gabier and Peters studied interior architecture and environmental studies, respectively, before switching to fashion design, prompting Peters to proclaim, “Being varied in your background just gives you a lot more to draw on as reference; there’s no set method of how you have to approach something.”
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy10/11A.A.
Antonio Azzuolo“The basic premise is building a man’s wardrobe,” explains Montreal-bred menswear designer Antonio Azzuolo. Azzuolo, 41 (photographed with actor Ben Barnes), was at a sewing machine by age six (his mother was a seamstress; his father, a tailor’s apprentice) and went on to Hermès, Kenzo, and, most recently, Ralph Lauren as menswear design director before launching his own line, in 2008, of carefully crafted pieces that cater to the downtown dandy. The result is a harmonious union of Upper and Lower East Side style—classic tailoring fused with off-kilter touches like slightly cropped jackets and rounded shirt collars. “There’s a good balance in my collectsions between my highly tailored pieces and this kind of more forward, edgy, casual aspect,” he says. “So there’s a poetic side and a creative side.”
Photographed by Norman Jean Roy11/11Carlos Campos
Carlos Campos navigates deftly around his recently opened microboutique on the Lower East Side, pulling out pima-cotton polo shirts in hand-dyed deep-sea blues. “We play a lot with color because we like basics,” says the 38-year-old menswear designer (left, photographed here with musician Theophilus London), who hails from Honduras and hopes to open ten stores—mostly in South America—within the next five years. “The ideal customer is a guy like me, who really appreciates the details; I cannot design something if I’m not thinking about how it’s going to be constructed.” Campos creates all of his patterns and colors himself, which determines both his bottom line and his schedule: “I think that’s the reason why I’m still in business; I save a lot of money making everything myself! I have this little calendar that says, ‘Today I have to do two patterns, three patterns.’ When it’s something fun, I do it on Saturday or Sunday!” In this story: Production design by Nick Des Jardins at Mary Howard Studio.
