Indie Designers Pin Hopes (and Clothes) on Indie Singers
COVERED with sticky beer spills, the floor at the Orchard Bar on the Lower East Side bears no resemblance to the pristine red carpet at the Academy Awards. But that was not how the Bellmer Dolls, an all-male punk band from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, saw it on a recent Thursday night.
As the trio strutted through the bar wearing suits that Herman Munster would have loved, a group of young women sitting in a worn banquette flashed flirty looks from under jagged bangs. "Love the suits!" called out one woman, in 1980's slouchy boots and a tutulike dress.
That was music to the ears of the Dolls bassist, Anthony Malat, 28, who is also the band's fashion designer. Mr. Malat was vamping to pump up sales — or at least drum up some attention — for his fledgling label, Sinner/Saint. Only about 40 people were at the bar, hardly the throngs that gather for A-list celebrities in designer gowns. But Mr. Malat, seated behind a beat-up cocktail table in a black pinstripe suit, was not fazed.
"Wearing my suits or having other musicians wear them out at night and onstage is how I get my jobs," he said, sipping whiskey from a flask.
"This might look like just a bunch of kids," he added, motioning toward the makeshift dance floor. "But you never know who's going to be in the crowd."
Mr. Malat, who sells his line at Body Worship on the Lower East Side and through a Web site, belongs to a new wave of young indie designers in Lower Manhattan and the arty enclaves of Brooklyn imitating mainstream fashion houses by dressing would-be celebrities (in this case prefame rockers), in exchange for exposure. House of Diehl, Craig Robinson, Bonnie Barton, Christian Joy and Cloak are hitching their stars to musicians who wear the clothes onstage and at select parties — Thursdays at the Delancey, Saturdays at Luke and Leroy, art openings at galleries like Rivington Arms — sure to attract stylists, bloggers and fashion assistants.
Scott Tepper, the fashion director at Henri Bendel, sends young assistants to comb concerts and alternative fashion parties and report back on the trends. "Young customers are a bit jaded and can tell the difference between a corporation who's figured them out on paper versus a designer who is hanging out in the same scene," Mr. Tepper said.
Can these designers, most with no formal training or experience, make it out of the clubs and into prestigious department stores? "All it takes is for a band to have one great video and one great song, and then the style is out there," Mr. Tepper said. "People pay a lot of attention to what young stars are wearing in weekly tabloids."
The sartorial collaboration between budding fashion designers and charismatic rock bands is a familiar story in youth-driven style movements. In the 1960's, on Carnaby Street, John Stephen outfitted many of the mod groups like the Who, and Tommy Nutter on Savile Row created suits for Mick Jagger. Anthony Price, a British tailor and designer, created the glam tuxedos that made Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music into a fashion icon. During the heyday of punk in New York, in the late 1970's Stephen Sprouse dressed his Bowery street neighbor Deborah Harry, and David Bowie later paired with Alexander McQueen.
But Andrew Bolton, associate curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said it was Vivienne Westwood who first commercialized the process with her anti-fashion punk style for the Sex Pistols. "It was the one of the first moments in history where an unknown designer used the relationship with a prefame band to purposefully get publicity for their own label," Mr. Bolton said. "And they both benefited from that collaboration." Ms. Westwood then went on to create punk looks for Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant's new romantic pirate image. "She very much associated herself with the underground music scene," Mr. Bolton said. "She was trying to draw attention to herself but also the avant-gardism of her own designs."
