Henry Zankov’s world is filled with color. When we meet at the knitwear maven’s live-work space in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood a few days after he scooped the 2024 American Emerging Designer of the Year award at the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards, the art-filled apartment is covered end to end with peonies. On the dining room table there is a particularly striking arrangement of Coral Charms in the process of transforming from cerise to orange that matches a Tina Vaia striped totem candlestick and color coded stack of coffee table books placed nearby in recessed shelving beside rainbow glassware. On the walls, a framed sheet of Ellsworth Kelly color field postage stamps hangs catty corner to a Gabriel Feld collage made from strips of masking tape in primary shades. And then of course, there are the clothes: Overstuffed racks that take up over half the dining room are filled with Fall/Winter 2024 colorblock merino wool sweaters and viscose maxi dresses in vivid combinations of pistachio and amethyst or persimmon, citrine, and dahlia; compact knit tube skirts that look as though they were dipped in matcha; and a wool tunic with scarf-like tie details in an intense shade of ruby that the 43-year-old designer characterizes as “crazy” red.
Taken together, the fall palette is undeniably vibrant, and yet there’s still something a little bit somber about it. Even the most exuberant pieces are tempered with stripes of anthracite or graphite melange. Zankov drew inspiration for the collection from Memphis Group co-founder Nathalie Du Pasquier’s textiles and decor pieces. “There are a lot of really bright colors in her compositions and then all of a sudden there’ll be some weird brown or gray or some faded seafoam green,” he explains. Maybe there’s also a hint of Russian melancholy. Zankov immigrated to Teaneck, New Jersey, from St. Petersburg when he was nine, and you could easily imagine a modern day Anna Karenina heading to Lincoln Center in his persimmon and coor-dinating fringed shawl made from shredded alpaca tape yarn.
As a child, Zankov loved sketching airplanes and building models with his engineer father. American cable television was a revelation. “In the Soviet Union there were like four channels,” he says. Zankov got hooked on fashion programs like Jeanne Beker’s FashionTelevision and Style with Elsa Klensch and from then on it was dresses. As a high school student at Solomon Schechter, he ran with an alternative crowd and on weekends would travel into the city to visit Soho piercing shops and try on Diesel and Walter Van Beirendonck looks at Antique Boutique.
During that period Zankov enrolled in a sewing class at the Fashion Institute of Technology and still re-members the first time he spotted one of his heroes in the flesh in the wilds of Seventh Avenue: “We were walking back to Port Authority to take the bus home to New Jersey and I’m like, ‘That’s Donna Karen, wow!’” Fast forward to after college at FIT, where he specialized in knitwear, and he would spend five years on the design team at Donna Karan and DKNY. Over the next decade, he went on to work for Edun, the sustainable fashion brand founded by Bono, and DVF before launching his eponymous label in 2019.
At Zankov, he prioritizes environmental and social welfare but doesn’t love the term sustainability. “It’s more about being mindful of our processes and the choices that we make,” Zankov says. He sources wool and mohair from small farms and ranches that meet strict standards for animal welfare and land management. And he supports local artisans through special projects like a capsule collection sold at Bergdorf Goodman made in collaboration with female immigrants from Russia and Georgia. “We ship the yarn from Italy to their homes in Sheepshead Bay,” he says. The offering features three ecru-and-black pom pom pieces: a V-neck cardigan, a sleeveless maxi dress, and a high-waisted maxi skirt.
Zankov may have just won a big industry award, but he’s not big on competition with his contemporaries. He consults on knitwear for Christopher John Rogers (who used to be his assistant at DVF) and he’s close friends with Rachel Scott of Diotima; the two share a sales agent and even held several of their early presentations together. “This newer generation of designers wants to help each other out,” he says. “We all call and text each other about anything and everything.” All have now won the CFDA Emerging Designer award, with Rogers and Scott going on to claim the CFDA American Womenswear Designer of Year prize in 2021 and 2024, respectively, so it seems there’s more than enough accolades to go around.
That sort of rebellious attitude and questioning of industry norms was on full display at Zankov’s Kim Gordon-inspired Spring/Summer 2025 presentation, held on a pickleball court in midtown Manhattan. Zankov experimented with new woven materials like windowpane check intarsias and vichy linen to create unlikely combinations of textures. “I love when things are not supposed to work together and there’s tension,” he says of a classic pointelle cardigan rendered in shocking pink wool and iridescent sequins that was paired with grass green wrinkled cotton basketball shorts. “The mood was us in high school, cutting class to go smoke cigarettes in the Dunkin Donuts parking lot,” he says. “I wanted the models to go into this preppy space and fuck it up a little bit.”
