In a recent interview, Rosalía declared Zoe Whalen one of her favorite up-and-coming designers. It’s easy to see why: Whalen’s clothes are living sculptures. She’ll mold papier-mâché around the body and swirl padded fabrics around its curves; she’ll wrap it in felted wool and sheer upcycled T-shirts and denims that flatter its silhouette and hug every inch. But they are still clothes.
Whalen has been a compelling talent to watch rise in New York since her very first show back in September of 2022. This is a designer determined to keep the integrity of her art-cum-fashion-practice, and she’s done just that up to this point. Except that Whalen is also ready to level up. “I’m trying to create a structure for a business operation and think about how I can sustain myself with this,” she said. “I still create everything in my studio with a very small team, but these are things I can actually produce now.”
Which brings us to Wednesday night, when Whalen hosted a dinner meets art performance meets fashion show at the Tiwa gallery space downtown. It was an intimate affair—actually intimate, around 45 people—where a cast of characters from the designer’s life wore pieces from her new collection as they cooked dinner and served each other and the rest of the guests. Whalen herself wore a charming hand-knit crop top with überlong scalloped sleeves paired with a tiered skirt (Look 23 in this gallery) as she served handfuls of arugula around the long candlelit table. “It’s a deconstructed salad,” she joked, poking fun at her own design vernacular.
A few of Whalen’s pieces also hung in the space. One was a melting papier-mâché dress, the closing look here, which she said was the result of her experimenting with the material to make her own dress forms. There was also a run of her signature tiered panniers and the wooden clogs she’s been working to make wearable and comfortable. “The panniers are hand knit, but they’re not just an art piece,” she explained. “They can be produced. The art pieces I made for the context of the exhibition.”
Whalen made beautiful ethereal dresses out of gathered laces, doilies, and lightweight silks and cut ribbed tank tops in the shape of corsets, paired with extra-wide jeans she treated to look aged and slightly disheveled. She also introduced accessories in the shape of a fanny pack, a kind of ergonomic design made to hug one’s abdomen curving down from the shoulder.
Each course at the dinner was paired with a performance. The main dish featured Whalen molding a papier-mâché bodice around a model wearing one of her diaphanous dresses, the result resembling Look 1 in this look book; the dessert course, a jam-based concoction, led to a performer dyeing one of Whalen’s white corset dresses; and the grand finale saw each guest who had been wearing a piece walk atop the table to show off their look. “The hope was to create a space of tranquility within or right at the end of Fashion Week,” said the designer.
For the last few seasons, when talking about her shows as interventions, Whalen has displayed a certain angst. Perhaps it was an excitement to get things going or a desire to be understood. Either way, that semblance of anxiety seemed to have been replaced by a sense of stillness. Whalen is still eager for more, but Wednesday’s dinner satiated her hunger.
