“I started designing this before the election,” Joseph Altuzarra said on the Saturday of New York Fashion Week, gesturing at his collection. “And then, as things began to unfold, we started changing things.”
Like the knit skirts paired with military pea coats and martinet tweeds that, he said, “started with really cute little small fringed edges” and then exploded into bulbous pompoms of yarn. Like the diamond crystals on a crisp white halter dress, which were originally “tiny studs, and then they became almost rocks.” Just as the shoulders on his bias-cut silk gowns became Joan Crawford-sharp, and the funnel necks of his coats almost like shields. Even the sheer organza florals, once 1950s sweet, had been, he said, “deflated.”
“We wanted it,” Mr. Altuzarra said, “to feel more defiant.” He was, it turned out, not the only designer interested in that idea.
Since the presidential inauguration last month, there has been talk within the fashion world, which overwhelmingly supported Kamala Harris, about whether fashion houses might follow the lead of tech and finance and sacrifice the principles they had been spouting in favor of public political neutrality.
But as New York Fashion Week got underway, an answer of sorts began to emerge, at least among smaller, independent New York labels. There, it turns out, the opposition is alive and well — and walking (even dancing) on the runway.
It’s not that designers are suddenly producing reams of protest tees. They are reaching for something deeper and more essential than that. They are weaving issues of sustainability, gender and inclusion into their collections — the kinds of values currently spurned by the Trump administration.
In doing so, they are embedding a form of quiet resistance in clothes, creating garments that celebrate experimentation and allow wearers to lean into their chosen forms of self-expression and subvert long-established (and resurgent) norms. Every time they get up and put something on — and without saying a word.
At Collina Strada, for example, the designer Hillary Taymour called her show “Fempire” and sent out floral camo jackets, so blouse-y they resembled sartorial bivouacs, and shirting slung with ruffles across the chest like peacenik bandoleers, on all sorts of body shapes and sizes. Two women pranced down the runway in white lace wedding dresses in the throes of a faux elopement, which also turned out to be the unveiling of a new business in custom upcycling. (Take your old family heirloom to Ms. Taymour, and she’ll make it into something new.)
Still, in case anyone didn’t get the message, most of the models had leopard spots dotting their faces. Because “everyone has different spots,” Ms. Taymour said backstage. “And we should respect that.” Who needs a bullhorn, when you have clothes?
That’s why at Eckhaus Latta the designers Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta said they wanted to focus on the basics. (Just the facts, ma’am.) Or at least their version of basics, which takes old standards and skews them left of center. Men’s wear and women’s wear tend to merge into one, with tops patchworked together as if from leftovers, pants hanging off hips and the pockets on cargo pants given a pregnant curve. There’s a voluptuousness to the designers’ refusal to buy into uptown tropes of fancy, the clichés of beauty, that acts as its own kind of challenge.
Leather pieces, including blouson jackets, jeans, A-line skirts, knee-high boots and a tote bag, were pieced together from strips of black, white and taxicab-yellow leather, like a blurry streetscape. A pair of dip-dyed jeans was paint-splattered to match a dip-dyed paint-splattered bong cradled in the model’s hand as if it were a clutch bag. Or a flag.
The point, Sergio Hudson said after a show of power sportswear in saturated tones of cherry, evergreen, lilac and sky blue, is that clothes can be a means of support. Even, he pointed out, a “teachable moment.”
So it was for him, anyway, when he learned that Usha Vance, the new second lady, had worn his white dress and coat to the wreath-laying ceremony in Arlington Cemetery during the inauguration weekend. He hadn’t known about it — she had purchased the look independently — until friends started texting him in surprise.
“It was weird, I’m not going to lie,” Mr. Hudson said, given that he had been involved with the Harris campaign and dressed Michelle Obama and Kamala Harris during the Biden inauguration. “But anybody who buys my clothes, I appreciate it.”
Indeed, he noted, the sheer fact that Ms. Vance could go online and get his clothes was an important reminder. “It’s a free country,” he said.
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