There’s nothing quite like the few hours before a fashion show. The runway soundtrack turning on and off, microphones blaring as producers give out instructions, designers all running around making sure every stitch is in place. This scene is certainly what you'd see at top brands like Coach, Ralph Lauren, and Eckhaus Latta; it’s also exactly what we saw backstage at The New School’s Parsons School of Design MFA fashion show. The school’s alumni include Tom Ford, Anna Sui, and Marc Jacobs, all of them showed their work at one point in this same way.
This year, the show was held at Ideal Glass Studios in Greenwich Village during New York Fashion Week, with accessibility at the forefront. Each of the 65 pieces that walked were accompanied by Open AD and textual descriptions. Within each collection by the 11 designers that showed down the runway, you saw personal touches of a future they all want. Whether it looked like an almost dystopian protagonist with a penchant for fashion or sportswear illustrated totally through knitwear, these Parsons students all connected their personal point of views into something that could be individually interpreted by everyone in attendance.
Second year MFA candidate Patrick Taylor wanted to create a collection that felt reminiscent of a family sports outing. A lot of the things that I make are by hand machines or I develop the graphics and then get them sampled,” he says. “And a lot of my collection is inspired by childhood, specifically, like skiing and sailing and the kind of structure and play within sports — but also family sports and how it brings people together. There's a sense of community through the sports, with sports also being both playful and intense. My biggest thing was trying to bring across both the playfulness but also the intensity.”
Kishan Tahara is focused on the artistry of the world. “The collection title is “all these arid places” and it explores how queer people and Indian people find parallels in surviving,” he says. “So music, dance, culture, recreating culture. And then I took key points of my life, like my great grandfather's a tailor. My granddad's a tailor. My mom knows how to knit. My grandma knew how to knit. The fact my dad owns an Embroidery Workshop, it kind of became all part of the mix. I read this book by William Burroughs, called Wild Boys, and it's kind of an essence reclaiming gay strength, and that's really important as a brown person.”
“You can be brown, queer and happy,” Tahara continues. “It doesn't always have to be a sad, sad ending. And when you lean into that you become more of yourself. It took me the last two years and probably 1000 breakups to get to this stage. When it comes to clothes itt doesn't always have to be wearable.”
Similarly, Margarida Feijã, is leaning into the issues that affected her childhood to build out her collection. “I feel like as women, we go through so many different types of traumas in our life, from the patriarchy and oppression, to how we ‘should’ look, how our hair should look, how our skin should be, every little thing,” she says. “And I grew up in a very small town in the south of Portugal, which is very religious. All my family is super religious, like everyone around me. And we grew up with this traditional costume that would cover the entire body of the woman. It was more used by my ancestors, but it was pretty much the first thing in fashion that really caught my eye when I was very young.”
Feijã says that traditional wear had to be worn by women who wanted to leave their house without their husband, something she sees as oppressive. That’s why through her fashion she wants to help build and illustrate a better system for women. So much of women’s value has been placed in vanity. Growing up, Feijã didn’t have a lot of hair and it was an insecurity that haunted her. So with this collection she’s trying to make clothes that release that pain, and hopefully in the process help women that feel the same way.
Like most of the designers that showed, Feijã made her collection by hand. So after spending months tirelessly working on each piece, she’s excited to be done for a while and move at an even slower pace when designing post-college.
Ahead, we went backstage to capture the chaos, and give you a firsthand look at some of the most promising designers in the United States.
