On Tuesday night at NYC’s Hudson Hotel, VMAN Magazine co-sponsored the launch of their Scandinavian issue with emissaries from Copenhagen Fashion Week. Indeed, the Danes were out in full effect: among them Camilla Stærk, Stine Goya, Henrik Vibskov, Bruuns Bazaar, Malene Birger, and the vivacious Anne Christine Persson of the Danish Fashion Institute.

As we all waited for the rumoured secret fashion show to start, I popped a Swedish Snus packet – an unexpected party gift – into my mouth and watched beautiful Scandinavian men dance together. The models stormed the stage at 11.30 pm, just as the Snus began to hit me. It was a diet version of a Copenhagen runway show: select garments from each of the aforementioned Danes, as well as Cheap Monday and Soulland, made appearances.

To end the night, David Boyd, Danish NYC transplant, performed with his hyperkinetic punk act, The New Politics. His stage antics – a complicated hybrid of cartwheels, break-dancing, and conniptions – were a riot. The Hives’ Howlin’ Pele should watch his two-toned heels; this dancing Dane makes his onstage Jaggerisms look tame.

www.vman.com / www.copenhagenfashionweek.com
Images courtesy of DANSK

In my years chronicling the flotsam of the post-Warholian NYC pop factory, I’ve seen musicians shoot up, artists hurl unspecified liquids at a wall (that I was resting against), and designers verbally scar interns for life. By 24, when I first met Priestess NYC designer Cody Ross at a ‘media event’, I already regarded myself as a shockproof media veteran, a hype-wearied culture vulture. But my cynicism was about to be abraded, my dimensions warped: in this half human cyclone, half sartorial satirist, I was about to make a new and utterly bizarre friend.

Among the joyless rank and file editor types double fisting cocktails, the sunny-haired Ross stood out like a cockatiel chaperoning pigeons. I instantly liked that he was my opposite; I noted his colours, his eighties action figure physique, his Crayola acid aesthetic with a mingling of curiosity and amusement. He was crazy, I decided. Obviously, I walked over to talk to him.

Click here to continue reading inside…

www.priestessnyc.net / images courtesy of Priestess NYC

Within five minutes of conversation, it was clear Ross’s maverick traits were off the charts. His charisma was hyperbolic, his sense of humour more twisted than my own – a rare feat. As he shared his life story, he spoke with a sparky alacrity no Ritalin-addled teen could rival. He is a self-made prodigy whose journey led him from the darkest of Texas to the top of the class at London School of Economics, and soon, an enviable fund manager position at an elite, undisclosed financial firm.  At some point, he added, almost peripherally, he started to make cool clothes in his spare time. Applying his entrepreneurial spirit to a new discipline, Ross was able to synergize his kinetic creativity and sick wit into an idiosyncratic streetwear line. He called it Priestess NYC, as a winking tribute to the city‘s latent punk energies.

Nowadays he’s usually the one calling me crazy (and he isn’t wrong – we share the mutual freak gene). I’ve worn his designs; I’ve eaten hummus and exchanged gossip in his multi-million-dollar West Village townhouse. I’ve shared an inebriated chuckle with him as well as endured threats of vivisection – on the same night.

His relative outsider status to the NYC fashion scene works to his advantage – instead of socialites, oddball musicians like Björk have worn his designs. Much the way an iconoclastic writer seeks partnerships with adventurous publications like DANSK, a colourful character like Cody requires a kindred spirit in his customer – this is not clothing for the faint of heart or humour. Everything he produces for Priestess NYC is irreverent, überkitschy, and self-aware, a sensibility he shares with close friend Jeremy Scott. If you ask him, his interest in statistics, probability, and pure commerce – not most creative types’ strongest suits, let’s be honest – harmonizes serendipitously with his subversive club-kid design motifs. Spirographic patterns, sperm prints, and kinky congruent elements feature prominently into Priestess NYC’s recent collections. Perhaps that combination of the cartoonish and the computational explains why Priestess NYC is such a smash in Asia, where the majority of its sales are generated. (Ross once remarked he qualified as half Chinese since he spends so much time in Shanghai).

2010 will be a year of expansion for Ross. He’s spoken vaguely of setting up flagship in both China and NYC”s own Meatpacking District, while snapping up real estate while it‘s cheap to flesh out his investment portfolio. Luckily, there’s as much fashion as finance in Ross’s future. He once claimed that exorcizing his creative demons through cute and creepy design lets him escape corporate hell for a few hours every day. Prone to the provocative outburst, he once warned me to not cross him on a Monday morning before he’s had his Starbucks. Remembering my favourite photo of him – the one where he is smiling and pointing a loaded gun at the temple of a fearless female friend – I got the hint.

“Trust me,” he said, eyes gleaming inscrutably. “Be glad I choose to blow off steam through my designs.”

Mind-blowingly beautiful decay at Gary Graham

As I hit New York Fashion Week’s halfway mark Sunday night at Milk Studios, it occurred to me that it had been a decent few days for autumn fashion – despite the snow, an immeasurable loss for the industry, and a few too many staid experiments in velvet. Most of the week’s key moments, fittingly, were delivered right where I was, at Milk Studios, unofficial home of left-field ideas for New York Fashion Week.

That weekend, Milk Studios set the scene for three powerful collections: Staerk, Graeme Armour and Gary Graham. Autumn/winter 2010 marked the return of Danish designer Camilla Staerk to the New York Fashion Week schedule, after a season off. She was back in stunning form, offering her faithful downtown sophisticates plenty of leather separates and wondrously twisty sheaths in her signature ‘liquid jersey’. This time, she injected her primarily all-black aesthetic with flashes of red, lending the usually slinky feel of her clothes a new empowerment. Staerk confirms that the collection interpreted the aesthetic legacy of The Newtons – a little Helmut, but particularly June.

Click here to continue reading inside…

www.staerk.com / www.graemearmour.com / www.garygrahamnyc.com / images courtesy of DANSK and Graeme Armour

One room away, Scottish dark horse Graeme Armour brought his complex, fractured, and crocheted leathers to the New York runway for the first time. Citing Yoko Ono as his core inspiration, Armour sent out intricately woven leather and wool garments in black, silver and white that created a visual ‘symbiosis’ with each other: t-shirts looped into pants, textures formed unlikely unions and the final number – a multi-plated shift dress – looked like a series of broken mirrors. So stiff, you couldn’t help but wonder how one could move in it – though you’d secretly love to try.

Armour certainly announced himself as a name to watch, but Milk’s finest moment of the week may belong to Gary Graham. On Saturday night, he presented an astounding collection of Victorian garments that looked like they’d been assembled entirely from the scrapheap of a dying Manor in the country: an elaborate bricolage of sumptuous silks, brocades and crinkly leathers. Embroidered dresses in quizzical patterns (that would look more at home on a curtain than a dress) balanced out dark and filmy knit overlayers that seemed to float, suspended from gravity.  It was a collection about innovative layering and clashing aesthetics – and it worked magnificently. Graham’s dark and cobwebby sensibility just might anoint him the ‘Brodarte’ we’ve all been waiting for.