Dylan Cao and Jin Kay, “the Commission boys,” as they’re known affectionately in New York, are trying Paris for fit. Their operation is still based in the former, but they’ve moved market and press appointments to the latter. It’s an experiment that has not come without its side-effects: The duo, both first-generation immigrants in the US, have often explored the nuances of the migrant experience in America in their work: Assimilation, integration, otherness. This element, part autobiographical and part anthropological, is what made their work feel utterly New York. This new collection, however, has a European gloss to it. It speaks to their versatility and adaptability, but is nonetheless intriguing.
Cao explained at an appointment that, “with everything going on,” they went into this collection feeling “quite raw.” “I want to drill into that state of questioning, as I think we all do right now, about the many different directions and opinions of all that is going on,” he said. The pair had watched Jacques Tati’s 1967 masterpiece of abstraction and confusion Playtime. “It illustrated this perfect corporate bubble where everyone is dressed in monochromatic grays, and all the shots are in a sort of grid,” Cao continued. Kay explained that the idea here was to pull this visual language into something completely opposite, the techno scene, which “has had a huge influence on both our lives” since they started living in New York.
Cao and Kay have made it one of their signatures to abstract the corporate dress code. Their collections often feel like looking at an office floor through a kaleidoscope. “It has been the foundation of the brand, so now it’s really about talking about the other subcultures that are important to us,” they said. The result here was both a survey of what’s proper and not in a contemporary corporate wardrobe, and—this more entertaining to interpret—how one can adapt the same garb and take it to the club after business hours. How does one wear a dress shirt in that context? Scrunched up and tied like a bandeau, naturally. An office sweater? Hanging from the neck, obviously. The most effective way to club-ify your slacks? A grommeted black leather belt. Cao and Kay have a knack for imbuing a sense of kink and frisson to the most cookie-cutter of garments. Their way of weaving familiarity and unconventionality together is what has made their collections a staple in the wardrobes of many a New York fashionphile.
“Imagine waiting outside a nightclub, in that state of ‘do I go in or not, do I keep going or go home?’” posed Cao. “It’s a romantic way of looking at such a raw moment.” Cao and Kay are good at filling liminal sartorial spaces: Making clothes for the in-between and the ambiguous—drinks after office and before the club, the Friday outfit after the week and before the weekend, dressy enough for a first date but not overdressed in case it’s just a friend hang. As they navigate growing their label with the transatlantic jump, they seem to be living one of those moments themselves. But clarity always comes: sometimes all it takes is the morning after a night out.
