Her decision to present what she called “a styled show rather than a fashion show” was both an attempt to move that needle and an exercise in distancing herself from a sense of obligation to create producible garments. Working alongside Paris-based stylist Taylor Thoroski, looks leaned into Mark’s familiar style vernacular, drawing upon her own dress habits. “Something I’ve learned over the years is that the things that I put down the runway are stronger, in my opinion, when they’re in line with me,” she said. “I’ve been very into not having pants on in the past. So we were like, ‘OK, let’s keep going there.’ And I’ve been wearing really simple jeans,” she says, pointing down to a slim-fit H&M pair she was sporting.
Of course, it’s been widely remarked that Puppets and Puppets is part of a lineage of art practitioners who’ve worked with fashion as a conceptual framework. Bernadette Corporation—the emblematic 90s Downtown New York fashion-as-art collective—readily comes to mind as an antecedent; presenting thrifted garments in impromptu runway shows, branded with the collective’s logo, was a key part of their modus operandi.
Their legacy has since been legitimized in both the fashion and art spheres. Funnily enough, just over a decade ago, a major retrospective of the collective’s freewheeling practice took place in the very building Puppets and Puppets showed in today. While this highlighted the rich precedent for using the ‘the fashion show’ as a conceptual vessel in itself, what fell short here was that the presentation’s format somewhat distracted from what was arguably its main purpose: the bags.
Indeed, the event marked the grand reveal of the first new accessory of Puppets and Puppets’s new era: an oblong shoulder bag, wrapped in a harness-like detail, in worn faux leather. Christened “The Pillow,” it’s a token of Mark’s recent journey across the pond: “I came up with this story that it’s an airplane pillow,” she said, “which represents me moving from New York to Europe. There’s something very comforting about it to me.” It’s certainly a desirable object—and seems to imply a notably muted direction for the brand, especially when placed next to the more outré cookie-appliquéd and banana-handled pieces that made a name for it.
While the setting in which it was presented was ambitious—and part of a sound conceptual premise—there remains some fine-tuning to do when it comes to synthesizing the high-concept approach with the fundamentally commercial nature of the task at hand. Then again, if anyone is primed to do that, it’s Mark: since setting out, she’s proven herself to have solid creative and business instincts. There may still be some further work needed to consolidate the foundations for the next chapter of Puppets and Puppets, but there’s cause for optimism in what she’ll continue to build.
