DANSK Magazine

Three’s a charm at Milk Studios

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.

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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.