The TABOO Series

Designer duo Sharon Mishiev  and Taylor-Paige Garvin is well-suited to celebrate the city with a collection textured in its image. First of all, they’re New York natives, which in this day and age means a lot. More importantly, the two are experts in construction. We’re talking garment construction, but this time around I mean urban construction as well.

The looks appeared to have absorbed the surfaces of buildings: crackled, tattered, and flecked. Some were fixed with actual building blocks coated in a camera roll of nearby streets. Others transposed the effects of exposure and time onto the fabric itself. Deadstock pleather, already decaying, was granted a total shred. Tweed suiting was plastered in, well, plaster. Flakes of it unlatched as the models walked, leaving a gorgeous paper trail which anyone with a pulsed finger will be following.

The night marks Iseder’s fifth showing at NYFW. And while the brand has already established itself as a household name in downtown Manhattan with their I <3 NY rings (as seen on Timothée Chalamet) and cool girl cuts, this season elevated their tailoring chops to the next level. Swagged wool and fitted peacoats bore sophistication without losing the sense of sex that is metropolitan, head-first, easy. The overall result was something like cosmopolitan camouflage, in which the body is positioned indiscernibly from its environment. Accruing pollutants. Witness. Age. To design from the outside-in is to position fashion as a symptom of conditions. Smart, and necessary to withstand the nausea roll of trend. For an independent brand to survive the algorithm, they’ve got to narrate beyond visual impact: this is longevity, baby.

The show situates its beauty “not from an imagined fantasy of New York but from lived experience within it.” For city dwellers, Iseder’s clothes are recognizable structures evoking other-than-tactile sensations: a sculpted tulle gown crackles like static. A vinyl mini dress in lacquered neon, flashing with the nighttime electric. Underlying the collection is an awareness of tension and place. Layered mesh tops tease out opacity and translucence, alluding to the palimpsests that make up most of modern architecture. This is novelty and decay, the abrasion of fashion straddling history and finding context inescapable.

Both Mishiev and Garvin go to Central Saint Martens in London, which for those who don’t know, is essentially a breeding ground for design genius. Yet the two are terrifically humble. When asked about her style references, Garvin cites the people in her own life. Perhaps this is what brings the work its sense of authenticity: legible identity. It is a loyal cast of characters, though joining the familiar faces this go-around is Patch+ on the music. Fierce.

Situated against the sterility of the AI image, Iseder presents a collection material and alive, grainy and real. Never sanitized, never flattened. These are not “Instagram clothes,” though they do photography beautifully. Iseder makes clothing that wants the world in it. Objects to be touched, to be worn— though not always practically. A series of black leather handbags were just skinny enough to carry some cash and a few spare cigarettes. But what else would we need? Maybe a pair of those white leather pants… It’s Iseder’s city. We just live in it.