A portrait of the artist at work

I bought this late-1990s Alexander McQueen jacket (above left) 10 years ago at the 25th Street flea market that used to go up in a parking garage in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. 

My parents and I often made trips to the city around my birthday to see the sites, museums and the fashion I couldn’t see at home. Three years prior, my mother and I visited the Met’s record-breaking “Savage Beauty” exhibit, which displayed around 100 archival McQueen designs after he died earlier that same year at age 40.

I was a junior in high school and had never seen McQueen’s designs in person. We spent nearly an hour in line and four in the exhibit, taking in McQueen’s work, the spirit of his vision and the sadness of his story. We both cried. Imagine my excitement when I held a piece of his legacy a few years later.

There’s some discoloration around the collar and cuffs that helped me negotiate down with the dealer, and I purchased the jacket for about $80, more than I had ever spent on a piece of clothing and borderline unthinkable for something I had nowhere to wear. I didn’t begin collecting seriously until years later, but I consider this the first piece of my collection.

These platform shoes are from Nicolas Ghesquière’s spring 2010 collection for Balenciaga, the product of a collaboration between Ghesquière — the house’s creative director from 1997 to 2012 — and shoe designer Pierre Hardy. They’re made of acrylic, wood and leather and are more sculpture than footwear because of their striking design and of how impossible they are to actually wear. A true runway piece. Very few were produced. They are a special piece in my collection.

Around 2016, I even found a pair of Ghesquière’s sought-after spring 2002 cargo pants for $23 (they had a stain that came out easily with dry cleaning). This design now regularly sells for about $1,000 on resale platforms. It had been about three years since Ghesquière left Balenciaga to become creative director for the women’s collection at Louis Vuitton. I think the distance from Ghesquière’s Balenciaga helped me find designs at prices I could afford, or at least justify affording. They were too new to be vintage and too old to be new. There is a unique tension in his designs; whimsy and romance and femininity alongside structure and armor and militaria. There is also an incredible wearability to his designs despite their intricacies, platform shoes aside.

The patches on the sweatpants are from different places, and a few are left over from the Rolling Stone shoot with boygenius and my work on the jackets for their 2023 tour. After Rolling Stone picked up the Nirvana concept for the boygenius cover story, I was interested in finding ways to make it their own rather than just a Nirvana cosplay. 

These patches and pins reference boygenius lyrics and each members’ solo work. I spent hours listening and relistening to this music and picking out ideas and turns of phrase that I could illustrate in a way that felt “found,” like using a promotional patch of the Morton Salt Girl to reference the song “Salt in the Wound.” 

There are more layers to it, too, like the fact that the punk band Jawbreaker famously appropriated the Morton Salt Girl as a band symbol and rewrote the tagline “when it rains it pours” to “when it pains it roars.” Jawbreaker toured with Nirvana in the early ’90s when the issues of Mademoiselle and Rolling Stone we referenced were published, and Julien Baker of boygenius has covered Jawbreaker’s song “Accident Prone” as a solo artist.

The jeans are vintage Helmut Lang denim from the 1990s. They predate the trend of designer jeans featuring rips and tears and repairs right off the rack, and they would have originally been crisp and unblemished. 

The jeans’ previous owner is responsible for all of the holes, patches and repairs. My boyfriend, Ian, found these jeans as-is on an auction site, and they weren’t very expensive because of the “damage,” which for us was a beautiful improvement on the original design and added a lot of interest. 

We put them in our Arbitrage NYC collection and ultimately lent them for an Annie Leibovitz shoot of Kendrick Lamar for a 2018 Vanity Fair cover. Kendrick’s music is all about authenticity, and I think these jeans were ideal because of how they tell the story of the life they already lived. The styling was very understated. He wore a simple white t-shirt and gray hoodie with the jeans, and I think the combination created a perfect visual.

Helmut Lang has been an important brand in our collections. There was a turning point in fashion in the 2010s when vintage and archival designs became not just used clothing, but aspirational. 

David Casavant’s huge archive of designs by Helmut Lang, Raf Simons and others became popular for celebrities and especially celebrity musicians. Kanye West and Kim Kardashian easily could have worn current-season designer clothing for shoots and events, but they wore vintage instead. Both continue to wear rare vintage today. They sent a loud message about the direction of modern fashion, and vintage has really exploded in popularity.

Some of my favorite books about fashion can be seen throughout this shoot. 

“The Fashion System” by French philosopher Roland Barthes (1915-1980) is an academic look at fashion, written by an industry outsider whose focus is theory and semiotics. He’s best known for the 1960s essay, “The Death of the Author,” which argues for separating art from the artist, a conversation we’re very much still having. 

In “The Fashion System,” Barthes says it’s not just the physical garments that create fashion but also the “image fashion” photographs and “written fashion” editorials. 

“Women in Clothes” is a collection of essays that explores the authors’ personal experiences with fashion, their bodies, mothers and self-expression. The book is filled with everyday stories of women dressing their bodies and feels relatable. It’s a beautiful book that I have lent to many friends and is unfortunately out of print, but you can find used copies online.