It’s clicking. Both designers have become darlings of the New York fashion scene; known names to visit and see during NYFW (even off-cal, until now, in Whalen’s case). They’re building strong communities of repeat buyers, and have gotten stamps of approval from A-list stars (also repeat buyers). Charli XCX wore five custom looks of Allen’s for her stadium tour, while Paloma Elsesser just donned the brand on her AD cover. Rosalía counts Whalen as a favourite of hers. Industry buzz aside, both are head down and focused on the long game. “I kind of compartmentalise, to be honest,” Whalen says. “The stress of knowing about that momentum can become pressure to grow too quickly.”
Whalen and Allen may take different approaches, with divergent outputs, but both designers are building brands — and garments — to last.
Personal touch
Both Allen and Whalen’s brands bear their own names, which, for both designers, adds to the weight of what they’re doing. “I don’t know what the point would be if it’s a practice under my name if it’s [not] something that I believe in with my whole heart, body and mind,” Whalen says.
Each season is a way for Allen to emotionally process the world around her. “Ever since I’ve shifted into doing my own brand, the work has become very personal,” she says. This season, the designer is responding to what she calls the ‘cultural shift’ post-election. “There’s this state of shock happening and it led me to this place where I was looking for elders in my community to understand and navigate what’s happening to women in our culture,” she continues. Allen looked to portraits of artist Louise Bourgeois in her 90s: “She just has such a spirit and an attitude to her that was really inspiring.” The collection is a bid to capture this irreverence.
Skirts are slit high — “you can see butt cheek,” Allen says — in reference to Vivienne Westwood going commando to meet the queen. “There are pieces of theatricality that are inherent in these uses of historical silhouettes,” she explains.
Whalen’s work, too, is a personal response to her external environment — in the practice itself, which sits at the intersection of fashion and art, and at the shows where she displays her work. “The emotional theme is reckoning with bearing witness to tragedy and darkness,” she says, the underpinnings not unlike Allen’s own. “And within that, the space of community-building that brings forth.”
