ADVISRY
KEITH HERRON, 23
Keith Herron may be barely out of his teens, but the Sacramento-born, New York-based designer’s Over-the-Rainbow-themed runway show attended by rappers Dave East and Smino during New York Fashion Week in September marked Advisry’s 10th year in business. Herron started the streetwear-meets-tailoring label as a 13-year-old hypebeast obsessed with 1990s BBC Ice Cream, Bape, and Supreme when his mom declined his request for pocket money to purchase vintage grails he was coveting. “She told me, ‘Rather than investing in someone else’s brand, you should invest in your own,’” Herron recalls. “Five minutes later I went on my laptop and started designing.” Herron moved to New York to study film at Fordham University but dropped out a year and half in to focus on his label full time. The Gen Z designer only produces one collection per year and makes everything out of deadstock, a climate-centered approach he credits to taking AP Environmental Science in high school. “I learned a lot from that class about the effects that we’ve had on the environment and how to prevent certain measures from ruining this place,” he says. Working with leftover fabric presents a unique set of challenges, but with constraints comes creativity. “Often it’s, ‘Dang, we’re out of pink tweed, what do we do?’” says Herron, pointing to a dickie that was originally supposed to be a dress. “We cut it completely in half and paired it with a collared shirt and pleated khaki shorts. It made for this kind of masculine-meets-feminine look that was just really cute to me.”
TANNER FLETCHER
TANNER RICHIE AND FLETCHER KASELL, 26
Bow-festooned label Tanner Fletcher—now stocked at Nordstrom, Ssense, and Shopbop— began as a pandemic-era side hustle when Tanner Richie and Fletcher Kasell’s post-grad employment plans fell through. The couple met as freshman roommates at the University of Minnesota before transferring to LIM College, where Richie studied interior design and Kasell, fashion merchandising. The Gen Z designers channeled their love of home decor and thrifting into making their now-signature sheet shirts out of a trove of crisp cotton poplin Dior bedding from the 1960s, still in its original packaging. “It’s about sharing that thrifting mindset that you can always find treasures that are already out there,” says Kassel of the label’s eco-minded ethos. Sometimes the “out there” is their own slightly cluttered East Williamsburg combined home and studio space. For their beauty pageant-inspired Spring/Summer 2024 runway debut, Richie dreamed up a statement-making ivory gown for former Miss Universe R’Bonney Nola, who closed the show, that was fashioned entirely from ruffled strips of excess lace trims and silk charmeuse fabric left over from production runs of blouses, button covers, and blazer linings. The same technique was also applied to a suit, a crop top, and a tunic. “Future heirlooms are what we like to call these pieces,” says Richie.
GRACE LING
GRACE LING, 27
Leave it to the architect of a certain white stretch-jersey bumster maxi skirt suspended from the neck and waist by slim cords that Jennifer Lopez wore to perform on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in 2022 to make zero-waste design somehow seem, well, sexy. Singapore-born, New York-based designer Grace Ling uses CAD, CGI, and 3D-printing technology to calculate exactly how much fabric and metal is needed to create her signature skin-baring looks. “I was drawn to the idea of being able to create things without having to waste all of this time and materials,” says Ling, likening her design process to architectural modeling. For her Spring/Summer 2024 runway debut, Ling recut the J.Lo look—which also features a cropped leather blazer—in black to illustrate that good design never goes out of style. The Parsons- and Central Saint Martins-trained designer also developed a 3D dégradé novelty knit that that fades from opaque to sheer to create the illusion of censored bars and proved she’s a dab hand at tailoring with a pair of perfectly cut high-waisted trousers and an expertly engineered bralette held in place by a slim, aero aluminum bar. “I like to say sustainability is a design process, not necessarily an end product,” says Ling.
DAUPHINETTE
OLIVIA CHENG, 25
“The reason that there’s always Kermit green cashmere at Dauphinette, regardless of the season, is because I bought out this big lot of deadstock from a local mill a couple of years ago and I’m still not done with it,” says designer Olivia Cheng, explaining the presence of of heavier materials in her Spring/Summer 2024 collection. “Waste not, want not” and “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” are old-timey credos that this Gen Z designer can get behind. “I just have buckets of random things lying around my studio,” she says. Raised in suburban Chicago, Cheng launched what she calls the “Happiest Brand on Earth” in 2018 with $2,000 and a capsule of reworked vintage coats while she was still a business major at New York University. In a few short years she’s seen her resin-preserved flower chainmail exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and “The Orchid Show” at the New York Botanical Garden, opened a store on Bleecker Street, and done a J.Crew collaboration. Upcycling almost doesn’t seem an adequate term to describe the wildly inventive bricolage looks in her new collection that repurpose items that might otherwise be discarded, like a cashmere coat dripping with vintage cameos, broken jewelry, brooches, seashells, porcupine quills, and a crocheted potholder or a shift dress made from 200 matchbooks quilted into clear PVC. “I don’t think people realize how many strange and wonderful items you can find on eBay,” says Cheng.
Read GRAZIA USA’s Spring Issue featuring cover star Kacey Musgraves:
