Can Clothes Be Extremely Offline?

In 2015, the gallerist Jordan Barse attended what she describes as “a very arty fashion event” in New York, run by the Melbourne-based store and exhibition space Center for Style. While there, she noticed the artist and fashion luminary Susan Cianciolo, wearing what Jordan describes as “the most ethereal, most beautiful outfit I’ve ever seen. If I recall correctly, it was this white pantsuit, or pant and shirt set that had long strings of clear-ish white beads that swung off of it everywhere. It was clearly homemade, and I just thought, I’ve never seen anything more beautiful. And I was fascinated.

Later that summer, Barse visited a friend in Portland and took the opportunity to browse through Diana Kim’s store, Stand Up Comedy, known for its meticulous curation of established and emerging avant-garde designers. She noticed a smattering of items that were similar to what she’d seen on Cianciolo. They were, she learned, the creations of Sophie Andes-Gascon, a Canadian-born designer, who had arrived in New York by way of Brazil (Manaus, the capital of the Amazonas, to be exact), and had recently graduated from Pratt. “I realized that Sophie was obviously the maker of Susan’s outfit,” Barse recalls.

About a year later, Claire McKinney, Andes-Gascon’s best friend from Pratt, would start working at Stand Up Comedy. She had recently been the recipient of Pratt’s Liz Claibourne Concept to Product Award, a prize given to a graduating senior, which was a decision made unanimously by the faculty at Pratt (which included Cianciolo) based on the strength of her senior collection.

A look from SC103’s Spring 2022 show.

Another look from SC103’s Spring 2023 show, featuring a new version of their cult handbag.

“She was just a genius when it came to working with unconventional textiles,” recalls Jennifer Minniti, the head of the fashion department at Pratt. Like Andes-Gascon, McKinney was working on her own projects as well. “She was reconfiguring vintage clothes, hacking together a raglan football tee with a chopped hooters shirt, and tailoring these jeans in a way that was so different and flattering and intelligent,” Barse remembers. “I just thought she was so smart.”

Soon McKinney was back in New York, living with Andes-Gascon in an apartment not far from Pratt; both got jobs in the design departments of local fashion brands. The story from there is, at least in certain circles, a kind of fashion lore. They were both working on their own projects, which began to merge, and they decided to create their own label. The name, SC103, came from their initials alongside the address of their apartment, which Andes-Gascon says they saw as “the inception of our friendship and of this project together.”

Their first show, in 2019, was a packed affair at the Washington Square Park gallery 80WSE, where models, mostly friends of the designers, snaked their way through the jammed-in crowd.The clothes were an explosion of seemingly disparate pieces which felt almost inexplicably cohesive. Tiny dresses—which their former teacher and Head of Fashion at Pratt, Jennifer Minnitti, notes “looked as if they’re holding on by a thread but actually they’re extremely well constructed,”—were coupled with perfectly tailored denim jackets. Other models wore embellished workwear, patchwork prairie dresses, leather crop tops, and slouchy hats that recalled those worn by the Bloomsbury set, made of leather links that would become SC103’s siggature. The show mirrored the the lo-fi presentations given by their mentor and early patron Cianciolo for her legendary clothing line, Run. She too would often present in galleries, recruiting her friends to showcase electrifying clothes which she made by hand using unorthodox, often found, materials, like metal, rubber, and feathers, fused with textiles fashioned clothes she found in thrift shops or cast-offs gifted from friends. From that show, SC103 established a similarly idiosyncratic style, one that fused an urbane sensuality with high-concept, meticulously crafted pieces.

Models wait backstage at the Spring 2023 show.

“The construction is very complicated in a way, and there’s so much subtlety to a lot of their textile choices,” says Diana Kim of the store Stand Up Comedy. 

The success of those early shows, they tell me, encouraged them to continue approaching their work with a feeling of openness. “I think that was a testament to just continuing to not be afraid to show work,” says Andes-Gascon. “We’re constantly just sharing; we don’t really hold ideas that close to our chest. We’re just like, let’s get it out there, let’s show people, let’s get excited.”

Since then, they’ve been picked up by stores like Stand Up Comedy, Nordstrom, and SSense. In 2021, two of their pieces were featured in the Met’s Costume Exhibition, In America: A Lexicon of Fashion. They have since been acquired by the museum and are part of the permanent collection. It was around that time they left their day jobs and began to focus on SC103 full time. They continue to produce new collections twice a year, including their Fall 2023 collection, debuting today in a lookbook, styled and photographed by their friend the artist and stylist Dani Swissa. She previously walked in an SC103 show, and for the lookbook, documented herself in the various locations around L.A., working intuitively, occasionally brainstorming ideas in a group chat with McKinney and Andes-Gascon.

For the Fall 2023 lookbook, artist and stylist Dani Swissa documented herself in the various locations around L.A.

Another image of Swissa in the Fall 2023 lookbook.

“One of the joys of making things is seeing people make their own method [of experiencing them],” McKinney tells me. “Whether it’s wearing it, or putting it up on a wall, or putting it in the backseat of your car, whether it’s a heightening and humbling way of experiencing our clothes—we think that’s cool.” The choice to photograph their clothes outside of New York, the city that they are most associated with, also reflects this philosophy. The lookbook shows Swissa in quilted coats on cool L.A. days, in parking lots, and on the back of a motorcycle with just one Palm Tree visible in the distance. “There are all these cliches about L.A. that I haven’t really experienced,” Swissa says.“You can really explore and create your own city just how you want it to be.”

“There are all these cliches about L.A. that I haven’t really experienced,” Swissa says.“You can really explore and create your own city just how you want it to be.” More images from the Fall 2023 lookbook.

“One of the joys of making things is seeing people make their own method [of experiencing them],” McKinney says.

But another large piece of their success is perhaps surprising for a brand of their modest size: they made an it-bag. First introduced in 2019, the bags are a kind of miracle of construction in which a series of leather loops of various colors are woven together to create a slouchy over-the-shoulder concoction that is either a chic party bag tucked under one’s arm, or an easy day bag that dangles off the shoulder or across the body, all created with no stitches. They retail between $350 and $700, depending on the size, and are all handmade in McKinney and Andes-Gascon’s studio. The bags have become omnipresent below 14th street—I counted three at a recent Sheila Heti reading at McNally Jackson before I went for drinks with a friend, who also arrived carrying one—a kind of chic calling card for the downtown person who is interested in the fashion-y parts of the art world (Cianciolo, painter Eric Mack) and the art-y parts of the fashion world (designer Grace Wales Bonner, and the fashion collective Bernadette Corporation).

More exciting is that their popularity extends beyond that coterie. The writer and editor Lynette Nylander told me that TSA agents, with seemingly no knowledge of its cultural cachet, complimented her SC103 bag as it rolled through the X-Ray machine. Andes-Gascon’s dad carries one (“all the dads I know carry one!” she told me), and Barse is planning on buying one for her younger sister who works at a start-up (“She’s so excited!”).

If Run was, in part, a reaction to the staunch minimalism of ’90s fashion, SC103 can be seen, intentionally or not, as a reaction against the flattened-out nature of clothes when we experience them primarily online. “The clothes are very exciting, and they read very well on camera, but it’s nothing until you see it,” Kim, of Stand Up Comedy, told me over Zoom. “The construction is very complicated in a way, and there’s so much subtlety to a lot of their textile choices…when it goes on a body it becomes three dimensional in a way that you could never get from a photograph. We always encourage people to try their clothes on, and people are always shocked by how good they look and how good they feel in the garments, and I can tell you, it happens the other way a lot with other brands… With SC103 it’s in the strength of the pattern making, they really try to understand people’s bodies.”

Dani Swissa in the Fall 2023 lookbook.

Swissa reclines in a tie-dye dress from Fall 2023.

Another aspect of experiencing clothing virtually primarily online is that collections and designers often take a literal approach to their references; the same series of images seem to move back and forth between designers’ moodboards and Instagram carousels. Andes-Gascon and McKinney, by contrast, never work with one specific theme or idea for their collections. The result is, season after season, a sprawling cacophony of thoroughly unique pieces which are not connected by a theme or a story, but by their creators' excitement about working with each other, and their enthusiasm around the process of creation.

“I think vagueness is underrated,” Andes-Gascon tells me over a cup of green tea in their FiDi studio. “Just letting people come up with their own ideas of what they feel or think about what they’re looking at feels good.”

It’s an approach that encourages curiosity in the viewer, a visual prompt to delve into their own interior world. “It’s not easy to look at their clothes and know why you like them,” Kim posits. “It’s not necessarily defined in an instantaneous way. I guess that’s typically what defines a trend or marketability, is that you can instantly identify exactly what it is that [the clothes are] making you feel and that makes you want it. For these guys, I think there has to be a lot of looking and re-looking and re-understanding. And that’s exactly what good art does.” Barse has a similar thought. “The thing that you look to in their collections is, what new formal structure is going to be introduced. It’s like sculpture, you know? You’re looking for the kind of structural ideas that are going to inspire you to think differently about form.”

The designers at the finale of their Spring 2023 show.

An absence of a specific theme in the SC103 collections also allows Andes-Gascon and McKinney the freedom to experiment with ideas and techniques across different seasons. Perhaps most notable is their use of the leather links recognizable from their bags, but their exploration of different techniques and silhouettes extends far beyond that.

Andes-Gascon wants to keep experimenting with crochet, and for Fall 2023, they are expanding on the calligraphy that McKinney began working with last season, emblazoning garments with the word “scenery.” (The word was chosen from a list of words that began with “sc”; they landed on one that revolved around their love of nature.) It’s a poetic way of understanding the ephemeral nature of fashion, which is often thought of as a negative. But by working on a small scale, often with reused materials, McKinney and Andes-Gascon have found that creates less commercial pressure, and more creative liberty. “It makes things feel a little bit less important, in a good way,” Andes-Gascon tells me. “It forces you to just put out work.” If larger brands are essentially locked into a biannual production schedule (and often, it’s even more frequent), Andes-Gascon says that “in the way that we work, it’s just play.”

That sense of play struck Amanda Garfinkel, the Assistant Curator at the Met Costume Institute who first came across SC103. “They’re not perfecting established techniques,” she told me. “It’s not academic; it’s more intuitive. It’s such a personal expression of their creativity.” The personal nature of the garments is not limited to the way in which they reflect McKinney and Andes-Gascon’s connection to one another, although they are palpably the product of ideas brought forth from the secret world of friendship, but the way they live their lives in general. “The whole way they live is incredibly organic and filled with friends and so endlessly exposed to naturally occurring beauty,” Barse tells me. Minniti, their Pratt professor, agrees. “When I saw the clothes at the last show, some of them were soaking wet, it’s not so precious. The preciousness is that we live in our clothes and they have stories, and they have experiences…and at the same time, they’re totally gorgeous and beautiful. That’s where it becomes precious rather than pristine.”

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