Big Chic Energy. Vaquera SS24

September 26, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee opened Paris Fashion Week with a bang, delivering big chic energy with their Vaquera fashion show. The designers emerged for their bows in matching sunglasses, big eye-obscuring shields of the kind worn by A-list celebrities. They said their collection was a consideration of the ways in which stars (and the rest of us) negotiate lives mediated by a 24/7 barrage of cameras. Do you want to be seen or do you want to hide? Is there a difference in a world where everyone is wielding an iPhone? The collection had a couple of gritty Margiela references, especially all the faux fur elements and XXL silhouettes, but in case of Vaquera, it’s never about knocking off, but revisiting their fashion gurus. After opening with a gold fishnet catsuit, the breasts outlined like bullseyes, many of the “normal” looks that followed were split down the back, exposing bra straps and panties. Other looks used underwear as decoration. The pink satin briefs fixed to the front of an otherwise conventional skirt might not have registered as all that outré on the runway, but on the street it’d be a different story. Standing up along the runway, like fans crowding a police barricade at a red carpet or outside a fashion show, the crowd hooted and hollered in appreciation. There aren’t many collections in Paris that deliver Vaquera’s kind of edgy fun. Hopefully, some bold starlet will wear Vaquera’s bleached denim ball gown.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Runaway Bride. Vaquera AW23

February 28, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Backstage at their Vaquera fashion show on the first day of Paris Fashion Week, Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee were talking about dreams and nightmares, and how they can become interchangeable as time goes by. “We’re excited about selling commercial things,” DiCaprio said. “But I think this season we weren’t afraid to make things that weren’t necessarily for sales, and to say that that is an integral part of our brand.” Take the fun silvery sequin dresses or the various iterations of the wedding dress. I mean, wearing Vaquera on that special day is quite a statement. Other non-commercial garments were the jeans studded with blunt-ended nails which reportedly weigh a couple of kilograms. Mixed in amongst those punkish pants were more readily wearable pieces in the form of army sweaters and nylon cargos, and a faded black leather peacoat and pants. In the early New York days of Vaquera, back when the brand had a more conceptual direction, they designed polo dresses with pointillist renderings of their designer heroes, Vivienne Westwood among them. She was present in their latest show via an updated version of her infamous “tit top” with twisted and tucked “nipple” details. She’s the proof that you can mix business and non-conformity.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Avantgarde-ness. Vaquera SS23

September 27, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

Five years ago, with bold attitude and confidence, Vaquera started out in New York and quickly became the most-talked about and hard to classify emerging brand in town. In 2022, the brand opens Paris Fashion Week and is backed by Dover Street Market, and yet it’s still difficult to put a finger on it. Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee aren’t doing conventional, mainstream fashion, but somehow manage to keep their avantgarde-ness commercially attainable: think great, over-sized jackets and too-cool-to-be-true denim. “We’ve really been pushing toward having more commercial clothing and that is still really important to us,” Taubensee said backstage of the spring-summer 2023 fashion show. “But it’s also important to remain true to what we did this for, which is expressing ourselves.” Enter American flag dress, made from faded flags that were stolen by DiCaprio’s friends from houses on Fire Island, its construction more ambitious than the one from their debut. A deconstructed wedding dress – safety-pinned at the bodice, spliced down the middle, and worn over pink stretch satin athleisure and denim cut-offs – once belonged to DiCaprio’s mom. They aren’t likely to put these pieces into production, but they are representative of the Vaquera spirit, which is irreverently anti-establishment. That irreverence came across in metallic “polo” shirts stitched with a lassoing cowboy instead of a mallet wielding polo player. Meanwhile, the acid wash denim’s faint yellow cast came from what Taubensee described as soy stain; “we actually use soy sauce,” she explained.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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All About Love. Vaquera AW22

March 2, 2022 | Design & Culture by Ed

“Fashion fan fiction” is how Patric DiCaprio and Bryn Taubensee used to describe Vaquera: tribute clothes for a world obsessed with referential dress. Bringing their runway show to Paris and showing at Dover Street Market’s 35-37 space for autumn-winter 2022 is the ultimate fashion fan fiction come true. Now instead of idolizing runway legends from afar, these American designers have “started becoming the people who we idolized,” said Taubensee. Their craftsmanship has been on a steady uptick since linking with Dover Street Market Paris in early 2020, and this season they’ve made padded moto jacket puffers, tinsel-like sequin dresses, and airy angora knits that feel as high quality as they look. Bags have been developed for the second season and footwear is a collaboration with Vans alongside the same vintage shoes the brand has used for six years, repainted each season to coordinate with the collection. Love, in fact, was the driver for the Vaquera this season. Romance was never really a feeling one got at their all-bass, hurried catwalks back in New York, but a transatlantic journey, coupled with ideas of Maggie Cheung’s sensual performance in 1996’s Irma Vep, has made the Vaquera tone gentler. Now their big ruffles seem less campy, more tender. Their plaid skirts and schoolgirl jumpers feel like the clothes of teenage crushes, and their suiting is covered in professions of love. Even a hair clip reads YOU inside a jet black heart. The brand’s signature teddy, elongated into a dress, is now translucent and trimmed in white lace, an invitation to come closer, to see, and to be seen.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.

Rituals. Vaquera SS22

September 14, 2021 | Design & Culture by Ed

Vaquera is growing up, but it keeps on being true to its core identity of one of New York’s most daring and intriguing brands. Where the label had once used real trash bags and duct tape as textile stand-ins, it is now using specially developed fabrics. And spring-summer 2022 saw the first Vaquera handbags – shaped like classical instrument cases including shrunken carriers for a violin, snare drum and flute. “It’s changed everything, as we headed into the pandemic we probably wouldn’t have been able to keep this business open without them. We owe everything to them – it’s been an incredible partnership,” Bryn Taubensee said of Dover Street Market Paris’ September 2020 pledge to help the brand’s development. “I think this brand started with a DIY spirit and now we have this structure with Comme and have come so far with sales,” Patric DiCaprio added. The designers, which recently saw their third counterpart Claire Sullivan depart to work on personal projects, said their overall mood was swayed by notions of “luck and superstition and trying to take control of a situation that’s out of control – the rituals you can do to make yourself feel powerful”. Between the lace tights, leggings with a heart cutout perfectly aligned over the buttocks and ballooning gowns tiered in the formation of a New York City sidewalk trash heap, Vaquera delivers its underground quintessence in a less amateur manner.