The vibe of Bushwick Fashion Night, which took place this past Sunday evening at House of Yes, felt like an antidote to New York Fashion Week (NYFW), currently ongoing in midtown Manhattan. Filled with curvy, glowing bodies voguing down the runway in asymmetrical cuts, clashing prints, plunging necklines, and baggy, often androgynous silhouettes, it felt like an avant-garde flea market that happened to take place in an underground nightclub. The event featured a “marketplace” in the lobby, where guests could purchase designs from the runway directly from the designers.

The show was organized by Oliver Correa of HiFi Collective and Sasha Charoensub of Bushwick’s The Loner. This is the second fashion show the pair have put on. The first took place last year, also during NYFW. Both shows were intended as a way to subvert NYFW’s history of celebrating conventional beauty standards, and to provoke new ways of thinking about what fashion can be and represent.

Charoensub said that she and Correa had a shared network of talented people in the local fashion and music industries, whom the pair hoped to share with the neighborhood. The designers for the show were all friends, or people separated from them by one degree. Sick of having to travel to “mainstream events” in midtown to see runway fashion, Charoensub wanted to create something that was accessible to people in Bushwick, both physically and aesthetically.