Drink.More.Water

Hi METAL! I’m doing great and excited to be talking with you all! I’m home at my studio in NYC right now, where I was born and raised.

It is true, yes. I went to school for art history and always loved fashion but never studied it formally, and then I worked on the business/PR side of the industry for many years. When I launched my brand, it was very basic at first, just screen printing on top of blank suits and shirts and whatnot. So I sort of learned as I went, taking sewing and patternmaking classes here and there so I could learn the base-level necessary skills, and then yeah, just learning on the fly as my brand progressed. The first few collections were very much me learning as I went, and looking back, I don’t necessarily love the work I was doing at the time, but the ideas were there; I just didn’t have the skills for the right execution. I’d say it took me until Season 3 to really learn how to do a full cut-and-sew collection, and by Season 4 I was doing work I was actually proud of.

I always loved fashion and wanted to be a designer, but the dream seemed so unattainable, so it just never came across as a real possibility. But all throughout college and when I graduated, I always worked in fashion, doing a little bit of everything. I worked in PR for brands and agencies, I worked for trade shows, and I worked for a custom tailor for several years. So I was always in the industry but always in non-creative, business-side roles, which after several years was really making me miserable. So I decided to take a chance, and I quit, got a bartending job to pay the bills, and started my brand in 2018, and six years later here we are.

It’s actually just because I drink a ton of water; hydration is very important to me. So I had that phrase rattling in my head and just went with it. People always think there’s some deeper meaning to it, but there isn’t really (laughs).

I’ve always said that each collection is about building its own world and narrative around it. So with each season, I come up first with the theme and the story I want to tell and build out from there. That’s why I call it “top-down” because everything builds off the mythology of that season’s themes rather than just creating cool one-off pieces. So the world-building and narratives of each season are something that I consider a hallmark of this project, and it’s something that I can confidently say we do as well as any other brand out there.

We threw the show last weekend at this warehouse space in Brooklyn. I love being off-calendar from the fashion seasons because it puts all eyes on us rather than being just one of the million events that happen during Fashion Week. For the past four seasons, we’ve been on the schedule of doing one collection a year during July, usually at a Brooklyn warehouse. It’s great because no one else is doing runway shows in July in NYC, and we get to have both our creative family and all the industry professionals come out and experience it with us, and it puts our work front and centre.

I love the fashion show format because it’s the best opportunity I have to bring my world to the public. Obviously, with the clothes, being able to show them in the context that we want to is great. But also being able to put on artists from our scene is so much fun; we usually always have one DJ and one or two live acts per show. Right now we do what we can on a limited budget, but as DMW expands, I’d love to keep building out the live show as a more experiential type of theatre show. So few brands these days take advantage of the live show format as a vehicle for storytelling in the way that, say, McQueen used to. So as we grow and (hopefully) get larger budgets for future shows, I’d love to keep doing it bigger and better every year.

While designing this collection as the world crumbles around us, I found myself drawn back to the ideas of utopian architecture that I studied in college as an art history major. At a time when almost everyone in power seems to just accept our further slide into the world getting worse and worse, it’s startling to think about a time when there were these grand ideas of how to fix the world’s problems via design. You had thinkers like Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Moses, and the Soviet constructivists like Vladimir Tatlin who saw design not just as a thing of beauty but as a way to truly solve society’s problems via these grand projects, whether they were Tatlin’s Tower, the Plan Voisin, the Manhattan Dome, and more. They were strikingly ambitious in a way that seems admirable today in a society marked by the general malaise of decline. However, one thing most of these projects shared was how sterile and stripped of humanity they all were. Le Corbusier proposed razing all of downtown Paris to build giant megatowers because he thought they would be more efficient. In almost all of his writing, there’s a striking lack of any mention of people, who you’d assume would supposedly be the ones to benefit from these grand projects. Robert Moses didn’t just have theories; he really did tear down entire neighbourhoods just to ram highways through them. In so many of these cases, there’s an overwhelming sense of being so sure of their genius and sense of progress that the creators just completely lost sight of their humanity and who all this “progress” was supposed to benefit anyway.

Usually when I’m designing a collection, I’ll have an idea that doesn’t really fit with what I’m doing at the time, but I’ll save for a later season, so I already have a head start when I go to work on a collection. For whatever reason that didn’t really happen this year, so when I finished with Season 5 Deliver Us From Evil, I really was at a loss with where to go for this collection. Eventually, I came to the 1927 Fritz Lang movie Metropolis, which is obviously where the collection’s name comes from, and the epic scale of the movie brought me to the utopian architects, and everything went from there.

That’s hard! I’m honestly really proud of the work I did this season, and I really like several of the pieces (laughs). If I had to choose, I’d say the red Maria sweater worn by my friend Meg Spectre is my favourite individual piece. Either that or the orange Tatlin denim jacket/jeans set.

It’s absolutely a parallel to the current day because I feel like in our current society we’re both losing our own humanity without solving any of the problems. All of these 20th-century dystopian novels like 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 imagined society having solved all its problems but at a steep personal cost. Meanwhile, what we actually got was a society just accepting our slow descent into everything getting worse and worse without anyone offering any real solutions.

It’s funny because, despite being a designer, not a musician, I feel like I’m more in the NYC music scene than the fashion scene since all of my creative family are artists I style and work with. There’s such an exciting creative energy coming out of New York right now. Obviously, you have brands like Bode, ALD, Telfar, and KidSuper, all of whom really set the roadmap on how to make it as an independent brand in 2024. In terms of music, there are so many amazing artists coming up, many of whom I’m blessed to call my friends and collaborators, like Shallowhalo, Hyderdaze, Savoia, Big Dumb Baby, Promiseland, Sid Simons, Model/Actriz, The Dare, The Life, Laurel Canyon... I mean, I could go on for ages. It’s so exciting to be a part of, and it’s really what keeps me going creatively being a part of such a wonderful scene.

I loved the shoot and how it came out so much. I’ve been obsessed with Marcus’s work for years, and I was so excited when he said he was down to connect on this project. I think he’s truly going to be a generational artist; I’ve called him this era’s Robert Mapplethorpe, and I don’t throw around that comparison lightly. He brings such an epic scale but somehow also an intimate, personal touch to every photo he takes. It's breathtaking. The models I choose are always people I know and work with. In the way that I call every season of DMW a story, I love to think of models as characters within the story, rather than just human clothing racks. So I always try to keep it in the family and only work with models I’m either friends with or have worked with professionally in some capacity, be it styling them, putting on a show together, etc.

Getting a feature in Nylon last year, written by my good friend Sophia June, I’d have to say was one because it was our first major magazine interview and felt like a real acknowledgement that we had officially arrived on the scene. Our five-year anniversary party at Baby’s All Right with some of our favourite musicians performing, which we sold out with about 400 people, was another because it was just such an incredible experience seeing this community we’ve built over the years come out for us. It’s tough to choose a third; any of the runway shows could easily be it, but I think I’d have to say Cole from Model/Actriz wearing our pieces on the cover of NME might have to be. Our first ever magazine cover, so it’ll always be very special for me.

I wouldn’t say I’ve necessarily changed rather than just found this wonderful world of like-minded creatives that I’m blessed to be a part of. I think before I was content to just make my art and put it out into the world. Now I’ve been sort of forced to become more of a self-promoter and marketer, which isn’t something I’m naturally comfortable with but it’s a necessary development if I want this project to continue to grow. I was in a really bad place when I started this brand six years ago, and working on it and seeing it grow and prosper has been very therapeutic over the years. So I’m happy to say years later that I’m in a pretty good place, and I’m excited for what the future holds, both personally and professionally.

I mean, it’s gotta be Rihanna, right? That’s the first name that immediately comes to mind, so guess I’ll go with her.

Bigger and better every year—that’s pretty much the mantra. Season 6 will be dropping at our stockists in the fall (bleaq in London, Studio 183 in Berlin, Retail Pharmacy in NYC, Moodart in Verona). We’re looking to hopefully do a long-term pop-up at some point this fall or winter in downtown NYC. Of course, more live music shows with our artist family. Also, through DMW being a creative studio, we are directing and producing several music videos for artists that’ll be out this fall, which I’m stoked for. But yeah, buy a dress, come to a show, follow us on IG, or just tap in with us in some way. Would love to have you on board!