Models at the Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen runway show at Performance Space.
Photo credit: Colin Savercool
words by Karly Quadros
In botany, a vespertine flower is one that only opens in the evening. From Angel’s trumpet to flowering tobacco to night-blooming jasmine, these flowers are often white or pale in color and are only fragrant in the late hours, beckoning nighttime creatures like moths and fruit bats. With her fall 2025 ready-to-wear collection, Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen has taken this lesson from nature – some things only bloom in darkness.
With her latest runway show lit only by candlelight, Whalen’s work is a celebration of the intimate, the domestic, fantastical sensuality, and an avant approach to fashion. She hand drafts and sews her garments from a shiver of wintery fabrics, all vintage and reclaimed, like tea-stained linens, lace, thermals, and quilted wool blankets. This is not to say that all Whalen’s clothing is sleepy and delicate. Models carried spiraled purses, strode in hoop skirts and panniers reminiscent of 16th century court fashion, and donned hammered armor constructed from vintage serving plates. Whalen said she wanted to show armor, not as a pristine suit presented in a museum, but as it would be returning home from war. To me, her armor has an even world-wearier quality, like ancient coins excavated from Roman soil.
Still, there is a distinct sense of coziness to her work. On a day like the February afternoon of Whalen’s New York Fashion Week on-calendar debut, when thin rays of sunlight melt snow into huddles of slush, the clothing did exactly what Whalen intended: it brought us inside from the cold. The show, held in a black box theater at Performance Space in the East Village, was the latest in a run of ritualistic runway shows that break through the breathless pace of Fashion Week and New York living as a whole.
“We were working against the tide, prioritizing things like ritual and intentionality in a city that is super fast in a time that wants to gobble everything up and consolidate. It’s not the easiest thing in the world. My mom thinks I’m crazy,” said Whalen.
Whalen’s signature gesture is a gentle coil along the body, like a resting bird curling its head beneath its wing. It appears in puffy bombers constructed from quilted spirals and in sculptural padding beneath draped skirts. It’s in corset boning and the arches of wooden sandals, constructed with the help of her partner, a woodworker. The collection evokes elements of Bjork’s iconic swan dress, designed by Macedonian designer Marjan Pejoski, that she wore to the 73rd Academy Awards at a time when the Icelandic singer was delving into her own chilly explorations of domesticity and private loves.
Whalen became fascinated by this spiral motif when she took weekly life drawing classes while she was getting her master’s degree. “Every nipple, belly button, knee, hip, shoulder, I would make a little spiral with my hand,” she explained. Eventually the shape moved beyond the body when she crafted a spiraling labyrinth from soil that her models traversed for her spring 2024 ready-to-wear collection.
Because she crafts all of her garments herself, Whalen sees her clothing as an extension of an artistic practice. For Whalen, fashion is “a form of sculpture in relation to the body, which is what I think is so special about it and why it can be such an emotional communicator.” Her bona fides reflect her journey towards a more holistic approach to fashion. She studied fashion design at FIT, Parsons, and Central Saint Martins, before cutting her teeth with labels eschewing the borders between fashion and art including Eckhaus Latta.
Some influences run much deeper, however. Take, for instance, Whalen’s reverence for craft. “I learned to sew from an amazing quilter named Laura in Arlington, Massachusetts and from McCall patterns on my home sewing machine, surrounded by all of these other women who just loved to quilt,” said Whalen. “It has this deep history as this thing that was relegated to being women’s work, but I think we can use that knowledge to a place where we have deeper respect for it as a craft.”
Whalen points out that in contemporary times, most clothing is based on patterns from the Industrial Revolution when nearly all aspects of life from clothing to the home were being reinvented in order to make more productive workers. The design of clothing – shape, fabric, restrictiveness – always invites different ways of living. The rise of sportswear in the 1930s signaled a world in which women had more mobility, physically as well as socially and financially. Meanwhile, as Jia Tolentino pointed out in a 2018 essay for the New Yorker, modern athleisure encourages women to be perpetually optimizing themselves and their lifestyles.
What ways of living does Whalen’s clothing invite? With her emphasis on craft, women’s spaces, and romantic shapes like tea dresses and corsets, one might be inclined to call it ‘domestic.’ We’ve seen the rise of a deeply political conversation around gender and the home, as exemplified in the stylistic (and financial) prominence of the trad wife, but Whalen suggests a much more nuanced understanding of the domestic. For one, Whalen’s work is hardly restrictive, and she presents her work on models from a wide range of genders, races, and ages. For another, her practice is more expansive, billowing fabrics to invite play, ritualistic runway shows to invite slowness.
Her upbringing was a bit crunchy granola, complete with a hippie “non-school” that was all about treating youth with the same integrity as adults. “My mom raised me, before it was in the zeitgeist, in this very earth-centered, pagan spirituality kind of way. She was a member of a women’s circle and we’d celebrate the wheel of the year and May Day and the solstices. We did the Maypole. I’ve been reading tarot for more than half my life.”
Perhaps most important to Whalen is technique and craft. To her, these are the key to longevity in a garment, both in its construction and in someone’s willingness to hold onto it and take good care of it. She taught herself to hand-dip and shape the gnarled candles that lit her most recent runway. She stained her garments with rust and tea. She even built the workbenches in her studio. Her time teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design has further cemented her reverence for sewing and the intimacy of passing down that knowledge through the generations. She says moving forward, she’ll continue to embrace new techniques.
“That’s why I’m able to continue diving into wax and woodworking and ceramics and metalsmithing. I have no business doing these things. But why not just try? I love being in the space of continuing to question everything.”
Zoe Whalen blows out over one hundred candles to close out the day’s show.
Photo credit: Colin Savercool