Still, after three years he was ready to “move back to the front end of fashion,” meaning the creation. In 2021, Curwen reached out to Velez, then a budding industry name, and offered to assist her. He stayed for three seasons, developing runway pieces, before moving on to Jane Wade, another New York up-and-comer, where he leaned into the production aspect of the job. (Wade was at Sunday’s event too.)
Curwen started developing this collection—a tight capsule of 11 looks—in February. “This is my way of introducing myself to an industry I love, one to which I’m giving all of myself to in a way that feels romantic,” he says. And indeed, his devotion to fashion is contagious and beguiling. You could sense it on Sunday night, as his peers gathered to watch the show, and it was written all over his face as he took his final bow, visibly trembling from the—let’s be frank—shock of having pulled it all off.
The skirt in his opening look, a shape he’d been “thinking about for years,” required three bolts of cotton voile to make. On subsequent looks, he shirred and shredded silk into shearling-like shapes that included a top, a bustle, and a cascading voluminous skirt, and cut the sharpest of shoulders into both suit jackets and a hoodie.
Asked to describe his own work, he turned to metaphor. “It’s difficult to say the words vulnerability and fantasy in the same sentence. Fantasy is the world that we escape to; vulnerability is showing a person a map to your safe place. But I wanted this to feel like that. This is where fashion could go. What fashion can feel like. A lot of fashion can get very sterilized and I wanted to make it exciting.”
Curwen’s inspirations—in particular the work of Alexander McQueen—were palpable in both look and spirit. That’s not a criticism, it’s a compliment. Few young designers are producing work worthy of comparison. He may be influenced by the way fashion looked and felt when he was coming of age, but what Curwen evoked with this debut was the rawness and sincerity of those times. He plans to keep the project small early on. “I’ve seen designers white-knuckle it, but I don’t see this growing quickly,” he said, “I want to keep this ship on a steady course.” All that to say, it’s too early for Curwen to be able to clearly chart his path forward. Often, the hardest thing to do is just start. He managed that part with aplomb.
