Surrealist Clothes To Remind You That You’re Hot
A resin fried egg harness, a faux fur dress with roses on the boobs, a sculptural showpiece screenprinted with an Italian Rococo painting, sleek tailoring, and some corduroy pants and trucker jackets: these are just a few of the ingredients that went into the Puppets and Puppets Fall 2023 collection. They were served up Sunday in a Federal courthouse in lower Manhattan that had been given a surreal makeover with grotesque piles of real food as props, including stacks of wonder bread topped with a singed baguette and a cake replica of the label’s signature Cookie Bag. If all that doesn’t sound like a recipe for success, designer Carly Mark says that’s exactly the point.
“I hope that there’s something in the collection that the 60 year old woman that has shopped at Bergdorf forever can wear and something that the 20 something that’s going to the rave will like,” Mark tells me when we meet at her Garment District studio for a preview a few days before the show.
When Puppets and Puppet—named for Mark’s Chihuahua terrier mix, Puppet—first debuted on the New York fashion scene in 2019, it often seemed more like a conceptual art project than a fashion brand. Mark has a BFA from the School of Visual Art and spent her twenties making sculptures, paintings, and short films that satirized commercial food packaging and consumer culture and were shown in prestigious galleries like the Breeder and Maccarone. Early collections (which were co-created with Ayla Argentina, a costume designer who had assisted on her video projects) featured huge pannier skirts and shoes fashioned from egg cartons. In other words, it were not exactly functional clothing. None of it was commercially produced.
Puppets and Puppets’ Fall 2020 show, the last before Covid lockdowns, was a hint that Mark was headed in a different direction. She took cues from the 20th-century French cartoonist Mœbius, opening with a model wielding a shepherd's staff and wearing a pointed hat and yellow belt (fastened with a resin chocolate chip cookie) like the titular character of the Arzach bandes dessinée. It set a cosplay tone.
But that collection also featured the first appearance of the label’s signature Cookie Bag—a black leather top-handle hag with a chocolate chip snack glued to one side—that was a surprise commercial success. Ssense picked up Puppets and Puppets for Fall 2021, which in addition to the Cookie Bag, included intarsia knit logo sweaters, and sleek suiting, alongside the weirder options. Bergdorfs, Saks, and Nordstrom soon followed.
“For me it was like one plus one equals two,” Mark recalls. “Everyone loves black handbags and everyone loves chocolate chip cookies. When I first launched them, people were like, ‘this is weird,’ but very quickly everyone was like, ‘oh my god, I get it.’”
Mark has been thrilled to see just how many women get it. “People have sent me pictures from uptown, like a woman wearing a puppy jacquard coat she got at Bergdorf's three seasons ago,” she says smiling.
The Fall 2023 collection included several more demure looks like cinched tropical wool suiting and corduroy coords. But overall the lineup, which Mark developed with stylist Alex Harrington, now has a decidedly sexy slant, featuring several iterations of the lace catsuit Mark wore to the CFDAs in November, where she was nominated for the CFDA Emerging Designer award, along with an oversized eighties-inspired checked suit spliced with a see-through corset, a slinky bodysuit made from cotton poplin shirting, a psychedelic tiger stripe faux fur coat, python-embossed pants with hip cutouts, and tons of sequins.
“People are very interested in sequins when they go out—they wanna look like hot and sparkly,” says Mark. She put them a pannier mini slit to the navel and on cap sleeved midis that wouldn’t look out of place on the charity circuit.
“It’s men’s suiting, but make it attractive,” says Mark. “The pandemic affected people’s brains in the way we think and operate—we were like all on lockdown for many years and coming out of it, everyone’s like, ‘I’m hot, I forgot.’”
Of course, this being the surreal world of Puppets and Puppets, the collection’s reference points come from a decidedly unsexy place: filmmaker and sculptor David Cronenberg’s 1988 horror movie Dead Ringers, which follows twin doctors in their descent into madness. “The film features these metal tools that are like these beautiful bodily shapes but there’s something kind of haunted about them,” Mark explains.
“I like things that are super wearable and commercial, but also things that are really sculptural,” Mark continues. “It’s like, why not do it all?”
And for anyone who still isn’t convinced of the appeal of a Cookie Bag, the fall lineup includes top-handles with resin roses and a new banana handle bag too.
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