The Cool Kids of Couture
AREA NYC
Last year, fashion label Area sent a model down the runway wearing a miniature folding chair, bedazzled in crystals and strapped to her body like a purse, and the internet went mad. “It was so polarising,” says Piotrek Panszczyk, co-founder and creative director of the New York City-based indie brand that has quickly become fashion’s latest cause célèbre. Some people were outraged, “but they were also mildly entertained and felt the need to comment”, he says. The chair purse made its intended mark, though, and recently resurfaced on Instagram as part of the infamous Bernie Sanders Chair Meme.
In January, the young founders of Area—Panszczyk, who is Polish, and Beckett Fogg, his American partner—created a similarly divisive moment, this time with the introduction of their first couture collection. Or at least, it was sort of their first couture collection, as the duo’s presentation was not listed on the official calendar of shows, nor were they even in Paris, where they normally take place. Not long ago, such a move would have been dismissed as an example of an upstart’s impertinence, but fashion is currently deep in the throes of a state of disruption that has broken down barriers of entry across all of its channels of design and
