Materials for the Arts is the kind of place that sounds made up. A 35,000-square-foot warehouse in Long Island City where the city’s castoffs wait to be useful again: theater curtains, donated bolts of fabric, buttons and trim, a stash of retired Phantom of the Opera props. A program of the Department of Cultural Affairs since 1978, it diverts hundreds of tons of material from the landfill every year and gives it away, free, to the schools and nonprofits doing arts work across the five boroughs. You can’t shop there as an individual—the point is that it serves organizations.
The looks here were photographed among those shelves. They come from Sustainable Young Designers, a project staged by the BK Style Foundation—the Brooklyn nonprofit that’s run Fashion Week Brooklyn since 2004 and built its name getting emerging designers, especially those without industry access, in front of a room. Both collections showed on the April runway.
Mimi Weinstock
Emidia “Mimi” Victoria Weinstock calls hers Troubadour’s. It’s her first collection, and she threw everything at it: built at home, family drafted as crew, in the weeks before the show. The reference is Alice in Wonderland—white florals against black, whimsy held inside something more structured. Mimi came up through theater and costume design before finishing a master’s in the Business of Fashion at Rutgers, which she completed in May. Her method is scavenging: old garments from home or the thrift store, taken apart and rebuilt. A habit that started in cosplay, she says, and never left.
Rachel Ann Marino
Rachel Ann Marino works the far end of the same idea. Her collection, Decomposition, treats decay as renewal—garments made to return to the soil they came from. She’s a knitwear and fiber designer; some of the yarn here is handspun and dyed with plants. Where Mimi salvages what already exists, Rachel Ann builds things engineered to disappear.
Both are circling the question the warehouse around them answers at scale: what happens to material once we’re done with it?
Credits
Produced by Rick Davy (@rickdavyfwbk) · Sustainable Young Designers for Fashion Week Brooklyn, in partnership with BK Style Foundation · Rutgers University–Rutgers Business School · Materials for the Arts
Creative Director: Maya Raymond (@bymayaraymond)
Photographers: @rebeccalevyphoto, @dope.vibz
Videographer: @alisonperrin_
Designers: Rachel Ann Marino (@rachelann.studio),
Emidia “Mimi” Weinstock (@evwdesigns / @mimi.v.weinstock)
Models: @amandaondrejcak, @mariam_m24_, @leiladelaney_, @rinkey.shah, @klainermv, @gregoire.angele
Hair & Makeup: @anika.jadee, @brithany_tapia_
