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How’s this for a New York Fashion Week party in the age of anxiety? No guest list, no VIP labels, no PR squadron to tussle with at the door. Everything is designed by real people and made in America with ecological sensitivity, and you can buy it on the spot (much of it for less than $100). Anybody can come in off the street—and all sorts of people do.
This was the premise of last night’s opening fete for the brand Everybody’s new Lower East Side pop-up: fashion as humanist utopia. As part of Informal Shop, a four-day installation hosting experiential commerce and cultural programming in a temporary Henry Street storefront, founders Iris Alonzo and Carolina Crespo gathered friends and strangers for a sort of anti–Valentine’s Day, anti-fashion event to celebrate the newest offering in their ongoing series of collaborations with non-trained designers: a tracksuit created by model and activist Adwoa Aboah.
Aboah first worked with Alonzo and Crespo when she asked them to produce the T-shirts for her Gurls Talk feminist action project, which are available at the store.. “I just like their aesthetic; I like that they use recycled cotton; I like that they’re women; I like that we talk about our ideas over home-cooked meals,” Aboah said.
Alonzo and Crespo also confessed to having a style crush on Aboah. “I know she’s been called an It girl,” Alonzo said, “but she’s so much more than that.”
The tracksuit they designed together consists of a boxy, high-collared sweatshirt top and higher-rise pants in buttery fleece accented by gold zippers with circular pulls. It will debut on Everybody’s site this spring and will be sold in black, navy, and pink.
The fit is as effortlessly cool as Aboah herself. “I didn’t want it to have a saggy crotch; I wanted it to look good on the hips; I wanted it to look good on the bum; I didn’t want it to look too girly,” she explained of the design. Her references? “Roller disco ’60s tracksuits meets Wimbledon tennis players meets Run–D.M.C.”
And though you can’t buy the tracksuit yet, the pop-up’s other merchandise is equally compelling. “We wanted to do something that really felt immersive, where you can escape into some strange fantasyland,” Alonzo explained. The brand’s signature “trash tees”—thick, vintage-style staples made from 100 percent cotton recycled in the U.S. from cutting-floor scraps, priced at $25 each—hang beside a mini-exhibition detailing the industrial process.
To showcase a pair of jaunty men’s cotton shirts designed by chess master Prakash Gokalchand—whom Alonzo met by chance in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park, where he plays every day—a chessboard and chairs rest beneath an enormous palm tree cut-out and a Hockney-esque pool graphic. (Later in the night, a pair of models, or Gen Z-ers who could have been, wearing tracksuits of their own—hers a pink Juicy-ish number paired with rainbow platform sneakers, his a Royal Tenenbaums burgundy—sat down for a serious match. No, Alonzo insisted, they were not part of the installation, and she had no idea who they were.)
Downstairs, an indigo-belted jacket with pockets galore, designed by artists Mae Elvis Kaufman and Kalen Hollomon, is modeled by mannequins sporting Kaufman’s formidable wig collection. (Behind them, posters designed by Hollomon juxtapose ’80s-hair-salon-goddess photos with on-point fortune cookie messages: “This is not a day to take risks. Diplomacy rules today.”) In a neon-lit corner, African-print body pillows shaped like snakes that have swallowed houses, designed by the art collector Jean Pigozzi, were styled as a plush conversation pit. But conversations ground to a halt last night when a pair of go-go boys showed up and stripped down to their contoured briefs, then writhed away before a circle of mostly female onlookers on what became an impromptu dance floor. (Who needs a valentine?)
A table with postcards and stamps for visitors to send handwritten correspondence—bright yellow pens at the ready—feels, in the smartphone era, almost like a provocation. Alonzo and Crespo have more where that came from: Tonight, Kaufman and Hollomon will lead a workshop called “An Hour of Escapism,” in which Kaufman will transform participants with makeup and wigs, with results documented by Hollomon. Tomorrow, landscape architect Margot Jacobs and producer Ed Brachfeld—whose military-style jumpsuit and sturdy cotton outerwear are part of the collection—will hold court alongside complimentary astrology readings; on Friday, artist and writer Kiki Kudo—who designed a little black stretch dress with playful round cut-outs, also available at the store—will serve a Japanese bento breakfast whose probiotic count, Alonzo made a point of noting, will be off the charts.
Is it all some sort of illuminati-grade branding exercise? Or homespun creativity seasoned with a dash of silly fun? Maybe it’s both. As the crowd thinned out late last night, Aboah, ready to rest up for one more day of runway shows, walked out carrying a plant housed in a pot shaped and painted like a pair of naked boobs. Across the room, a political action plan was hatched.
Open 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. through February 17 at 142 Henry Street, New York; everybody.world.