“Alternative white girl shade is all clairo shade, don’t you think?” someone was asking in front of me, in the short line leading to the latest run of “Krater,” a regularly recurring New York Fashion Week entry created by Giselle Manzano, pointedly taking place far away from the Manhattan runways. For the last few years, these have been run out of the House of Yes on Wyckoff Avenue, a decision that has signified these ideas as explicitly Bushwick-coded. Nevertheless, they have been steadily approaching the edges of the mainstream, with recent runway shows attracting attention from trade periodicals as geographically varied as Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam and Vogue Switzerland. “An artistic incubator at the intersection of sustainable fashion design, performance art, and electronic music,” claimed Harper’s outpost in Ho Chi Minh City, where Manzano was described as a “fearless leader” who has courted designers who have “dressed stars such as Kate Moss, J Balvin, Eve, Connie Diamond.”
In her latest run of Krater, the brave Manzano only appeared once, briefly, before ceding the stage to the latest crop of designers she had chosen instead, as well as to Marz Jackson, a glitter-splattered model and indie designer who was hired as an emcee for the evening. They imbued everything with the DIY charm of a Saturday night run of Rocky Horror Picture Show. “There are pop-up markets around the back, so make sure to get your clothes, honey, okay?” they would say, emphatically, between each runway show.
“Embraces caustic and audacious subject matters with pieces that utilize off-kilter elements by the destruction of tradition,” reads a line from the instagram page for an indie brand run by Kaylie Haueisen. Manzano had lined her up first. Online, her brand’s older designs include “BISEXUAL ORGY” sneakers she sells for $100; comparatively, her latest ideas are almost movingly subtle, notwithstanding a charged moment when two of her models threw dildos and butt plugs at each other. They were all wearing lots of denim, ripped in various ways, which steadily grew more elaborate. Under barrelling, pre-Beyonce western music, they circled the runway sullenly, leaving and then entering again, wearing further pieces of ripped denim. At last, Haueisen herself showed up, wearing a cropped D.A.R.E. t-shirt and gym shorts, and proceeded to pick up the dildo and waved it to the crowd. In a lengthy, all-caps statement that Manzano sends over after, Haueisen names this latest collection “YE-HOE” and says she “USED FARMERS WORKWEAR, HICK CAMO, FLANEL, DENIM, AND OVERALLS ETC., TO CREATE AVANTE GARDE LOOKS THAT POKE FUN AT SOUTHERN CULTURE AND THEIR IGNORANCE.” Good to know.
A recurring theme in Manzano’s curation of these nights has been an emphasis in picking up brands from Colombia; previous editions of her show have included others from the country like LAKRAS and Manzano herself, who is Colombian. This latest lineup included two from there: La Bloom and Papel de Punto, the latter a stirring knitwear line described in the programming as a “leading brand in Latin America.” Their show opened on Colombian radio broadcasts that introduced a similarly silent line of models decorated in geometrically gorgeous knitted lines. It was all very meta; a snakelike sweater that dissolved into an elaborate coif; a mattress poncho, worn cape-like around a graceful model who then spun repeatedly in circles. At the end, designer Laura Acevedo showed up, wearing rather stunning black and white pants, and waved to the crowd before making an outline of a heart with her hands. The whole thing felt very emotional.
Another motif of the Manzano concept is “sustainability,” a concept that came this time in the form of Hector Diaz’s “KURRIZMATIC” line, whose website says that they focus on outfits that reuse “discarded textiles.” The dictate to dumpster dive has surfaced collaborations with Stephanie Mould’s Smouldy brand, resulting in $500 bags “handwoven from old clothing.” Diaz’s runway pieces were more experimental, like a thrift store jacket paired with a crown of scraps and hand-stitched bike wings hanging angel-like from someone else. It was an interesting way to think about clothes, as combinations of things that used to be different things, something that Diaz’s various pointed decisions serve to emphasize. The most celebrated of these looks was a glittering top the color of chainmail iron, complete with a sword and shield, the recycled origins of which were not clear. (“This garment was made of soda can tabs,” Manzano tells me, later.)
These were ways of looking at Bushwick, a neighborhood of regular reinvention, animated always by a kind of endlessly recurring hipster clown aesthetic, that neighborhood of people who dress like the Joker, if he was played by Post Malone. The phrase that reoccurs regularly in all the materials Manzano has put out about her project is “anti-fashion,” which must, ultimately, mean anti-clothes. This feeling could be most vividly seen in the latest season of outfits from “fiber artist” Sarah Wondrak, whose work is described in the notes as redefining “the human silhouette” and transcending “the traditional meaning of garments.”
On the runway, they were easily the most difficult out of all of these to wear and consisted of elaborate runway costumes that, at times, reminded me of the more devoted attendees of the city’s halloween parade. (or “wearable fiber art sculptures,” as Manzano calls them.) At least one outfit was borderline ectoplasmic, the model’s arms trapped in a web of stretching fabric, out of which he delivered a dignified pout. The most logical was somehow a short dress made entirely out of what appeared to be tags used to wrap grocery store bread, another point for the reusability crowd. One of them consisted mostly of a colorful shawl, which covered the model’s head and which he seemed, at times, to be fighting to get off. Another looked like a costume from a DIY performance of Empire of the Sun. And so on, and so on. These were beautiful, in their own way, a vision of a runway that wouldn’t be leaving Brooklyn anytime soon.
“Krater” which calls itself “a vessel where imagination transcends itself,” also exists online, where you can follow their Instagram.
Photos taken by Andrew Karpan and Michelle Maier.
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