The Spandex Report: Williamsburg Fashion Weekend
by Erica Sackin
On Saturday night, about ten men and women in white body paint and blue lips were standing on a stage; they wore knitwear short shorts made from recycled sweaters. Only one was wearing a furry bunny mask but they all held croquet mallets. Surf music played in the background as styrofoam “snow” fell from the ceiling. Then Arthur Arbit bounded onstage holding a tallboy can of Pabst Blue Ribbon and welcomed us all to Williamsburg Fashion Weekend.
Williamsburg Fashion Weekend (WFW) is not, you may imagine, affiliated with the official Bryant Park fashion week. Arthur has been an organizer for three years; it features various performance artists/designers who, as he put it, “are not afraid to break the rules and cross boundaries in search of a deeper meaning to body adornment.”
This season’s shows took place over two days at Glasslands, an event space constructed mainly from cinderblocks and corrugated metal that is located across the street from the abandoned Domino Sugar Factory.
Arthur’s own line, King Gurvy, was described by his stylist as “Hawaiian surf with snowflakes.” The models had stumbled around the stage in their little knit shorts and rompers, pretending to play croquet and playfighting. One wore hockey skates.
“This is a platform for designers to really fuck around,” said Arthur. “It’s a kind of a vehicle for designers to let loose and not worry about repercussions, or whatever it is that designers worry about as far as mainstream vs not mainstream.”
The lingerie show, by designer Alisha Trimble, featured models posing while being fed cake off a silver platter. They had their mouths dabbed with handkerchiefs, and their faces were smeared with lipstick. Then one woman put the now-empty silver tray on her back and crawled offstage.
A show by San Francisco-based line Flawk featured deconstructed dresses, sunglasses and elaborate masks made from vintage fur, feathers and teeth.
Desira Pesta had 40s-inspired clothes and her show also featured an elaborate evening gown that was fastened with a ten-inch piece of welded metal.
“Williamsburg is largely young,” said Pesta, “and I think people who are much more open to a very handmade aesthetic. It’s grungy, it’s gritty, it’s kind more up my alley than a very polished hoity toity event.”
Everyone I spoke with in the audience said she found at least one thing that she, or at least a friend, would definitely wear.
“This is the first line of that’s really wearable,” said Dimtri Zabatay, one of the King Gurvy models said of that show. Zabatay was in little knit shorts. “Last season I wore something that was basically a dominatrix type of a cock piece that was protruding in a really scary way, and I couldn’t really wear that out to bars. This is something I could actually wear home.”
The finale of the night was Total Crap Uninc. Their show started with a model doing a striptease down to her black leather pasties and g-string. It also featured a straightjacket body suit over torn fishnets; it ended with the designer herself in a yellow leather jacket giving the audience the finger.
“There’s definitely more innovation here,” said Silvana Kim, an FIT student in the audience. “We just really love the neighborhood, and I’m sure we’ve bought a couple of things from these guys. We came tonight because a lot of this stuff is going to work its way upwards.”
Erica Sackin writes and lives in Brooklyn. She was once a contestant in the Ms. G Train competition, but lost. ‘The Spandex Report’ covers the lives of the youngs. Taylor Long is a photographer in New York-and there are more photos to see!