A few nights ago, the Pratt Manhattan Gallery on 14th Street was the epicenter for a very New York scene: a reception to celebrate “The New Village: Ten Years of New York Fashion.” The show gathers a diverse group of designers whose unifying quality is the fact that at some point they have likely been described as having a slight anarchic approach to fashion. “A few years ago I was talking to my creative partner, Beverly Sims, and I said ‘I just feel this community brewing again’,” said Jenniffer Minniti, the Chair of Fashion at Pratt. She eventually brought on Matthew Linde and they got to work.
The show, which borrows its name from a seminal 1986 show at FIT titled “The East Village,” which was curated by Harold Koda, Richard Martin, and Laura Sinderbrand, and featured the work of a wide-ranging group of artists and designers including Amy Arbus, Kiki Smith, and David Wojnarowicz. “A lot of these people were in their early twenties, so you can think what a radical gesture that [was],” explained Linde. “In the press notes [for that show], they say it’s not a designed survey, and it’s not a historical complete picture, but it’s an affirmation on the artistic qualities and possibilities of what a fashion design can be.”