The music was pumping and the mood was upbeat at Tara Subkoff’s Imitation of Christ show at The Hole, where guests, upon taking one step in the door, were given a garment and escorted up and down the catwalk by dancers telling them how wonderful and fabulous they are. The long room was divided in parts and in the second, painted black, models formed the audience watching the guests modeling, before they took their turns showing the new collection.
That all of this was happening on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11 made the event, for this editor, deeply poignant, because Subkoff was reprising, with edits, IOC’s spring 2002 show, which was held just days before the attacks. Subkoff’s cohort at the time was brand co-founder Matt Damhave and creative director Chloë Sevigny. The trio were much influenced by the Marxist-leaning, anti-capitalist Situationists. In The Society of the Spectacle, one of the key tracts of the movement, Guy Debord suggested that lived experiences, which create a sense of community, were being replaced by the consumption and accumulation of images of commodities. As a fashion brand, IOC sold clothes; yet as they were early upcyclers, for the most part they weren’t selling anything completely new, and they used shows as a platform for creativity and activism. Maybe their most brilliant concept was the one for spring 2002, in which guests unknowingly changed places with models. They became subject to appraisal when walking into a show space to find models with pens and pads (smart phones didn’t exist) filling what would have been their seats and ready to apply a critical reading of the goings on. That’s not all. If 9/11 hadn’t occurred, the show, Subkoff relates, “would have had the cover of The New York Observer. That’s how important fashion was then. We were going to have the cover of a newspaper and they were going to review intelligent articles about all of the critics—and when do critics ever get reviewed? It would’ve been historic.”
It often feels that fashion is still catching up with IOC, even after all these years. When Subkoff relaunched the brand in 2020, she generously decided to co-create collections with aspiring designers, thus expanding the mission of the brand through people in addition to messaging and design. This season’s collaborators were recent Central Saint Martins graduates Ed Teller, Lily Teiger, and Greg Harrison. The clothes, which will be available for viewing and sale at Surrender Dorothy the day after the show, were recognizably Imitation of Christ; some featured the brand’s signature letter or three cross emblem, and all were made from vintage. Lingerie and lace were constants, and this collection was very strong on slip dressing. Many of the designs were simply enchanting, whether the designers’ intervention was simple, like tying a ribbon around a neck with tails that fluttered behind the wearer as they walked, or adding inserts to a slip so that it draped and flowed with sinuous movement.
Fashion wasn’t so conversant with vintage when IOC began, and one of the questions was always how much did the designers do to the existing garment? That’s beside the point for Subkoff: “To me, upcycling is so much about the process of finding good materials, the process of a vision, the process of creating, a process of work; it’s not like how many hours went into every single piece. One piece might take two hours, one piece might take 25. It’s about the whole series, and the body of work, and the relationship between the pieces and the experience of finding things that are relevant for now.”
In reprising the spring 2002 show concept, Subkoff wasn’t motivated by nostalgia. The world today is unrecognizable from the pre-9/11 days. There’s less human interaction and more spectacle, especially of the digital kind. The designer’s goal was to foster “a sense of fun, a sense of taking ourselves less seriously, of laughing, of playfulness and of—to me—the best part of fashion, which is the community and the acceptance in that of enjoying beautiful things, and clothing and fashion and being a part of that. I come from a time,” she continued, “where you didn’t just see a show online; there was no online. You had to go to the shows, you had to see people, you got to see Isabella Blow in her hats… it was to be a part of something.”
With so much information around and constant stimulation—spectacle on steroids—the 2026 revival of the 2002 concept will have less impact. Yet Subkoff remains true; she’s not chasing clicks, but is on a mission. For this designer the climate crisis isn’t abstract but a palpable threat that requires both commitment and collaboration to address. “I think we have to explore more community focused approaches rather than optimization for ourselves” she said: Wise words.
