This week, we take a look at the political statements from brands at New York Fashion Week, particularly the common sight of “ICE OUT” pins on the lapels of many designers. Concerns about the assault on immigrant rights are particularly poignant for designers who are immigrants or come from immigrant communities themselves.
One of the most commonly spotted accessories at New York Fashion Week this season wasn’t a handbag or a pair of sunglasses — it was a small black-and-white pin featuring the words “ICE OUT.”
Designers like Hillary Taymour from Collina Strada, Henry Zankov and Rachel Scott, among others, made appearances with the pin on their chests. Those designers and others also took the opportunity to decry the assault on immigrants and immigrant communities by federal immigration agents in their program notes, social posts and interviews. While it’s not uncommon for designers to want to shy away from overt political messaging, this past season saw a wider array of both organized and individual statements about the political situation in the U.S.
Rachel Scott, of her own brand Diotima and recently named creative director of Proenza Schouler, was one of the most vocal designers to speak about immigration.
“This collection takes shape in a political and cultural moment marked by exhaustion and division, where resilience, identity and memory become acts of resistance,” Scott wrote in the program notes of the Diotima show. “It is about the woman who moves through it with radiance, force, and radical self-definition. Not in spite of the times, but within them.”
At Collina Strada, Taymour’s show notes were more poetic, but some intentional use of capitalization also made her feelings clear.
“The world is a vampire, sipping slowly on our warmth and wonder, leaving us pale with longing for a better place,” Taymour wrote in the program. “The snow falls delicately with intention, grace and poise inside our perfect satin-lined snow globes. No crusty banks of slippery, nasty ICE on our streets.”
The pins that both Scott and Taymour wore were provided by a coalition of groups including the American Civil Liberties Union, Working Families Power and the National Domestic Workers Alliance. The pins had previously shown up on the red carpets of events like the Golden Gloves and the Grammys.
Many designers at New York Fashion week are immigrants themselves or come from immigrant families. Henry Zankov, the designer at his eponymous brand Zankov, is one such designer who wore the ICE OUT pin and spoke with Glossy about using his platform to speak out in support of immigrants.
“I felt it was important to address ICE at New York Fashion Week because I came to this country as a refugee with my family,” Zankov said. “America’s culture and the fashion industry itself have been shaped and strengthened by immigrants from the very beginning. As creatives and business leaders, we have a responsibility to stand for the communities that built this industry.”
The womenswear designer Christian Cowan expressed a similar sentiment to Glossy.
“The fashion industry is built on the creativity, talent and resilience of immigrants,” he said. “As someone who began my own journey here as an immigrant, I believe deeply that this work is about humanity, empathy, and recognizing the people who shape our culture and our city every day.”
The urgency of the situation is even more acute for Latin American designers like Patricio Campillo. Campillo is based out of Mexico City and travels to the U.S. frequently, as he did for his New York Fashion Week show on February 14. He too wore the ICE OUT pin and spoke candidly to Glossy about his feeling at this moment.
“Coming from Mexico, being one of the few Latina American brands on the calendar, I felt a great sense of unity,” Campillo said. “There’s a dangerous polarization happening in the world. There are people spreading a lot of hate, but there are also people spreading love and tolerance and support. In this moment, we have to stick together.”
Campillo said he personally has not yet faced any obstacles with traveling to and from the U.S., but he said the feeling of fear is pervasive. ICE reportedly has a quota of 3,000 arrests daily. Both American citizens and non-citizens alike have been targeted, arrested and killed by ICE agents in the last year, many without being given due process.
“There’s a psychological effect to all of this,” he said. “Minorities trying to work in the U.S. are having their rights removed in a very authoritarian way. It’s not only the actual measures affecting people but the terror and the noise around it as well.”
Who won New York Fashion Week?
Increasingly, fashion week is just as much about the social impact a brand can generate as it is about the relationship between brands and buyers. Data shared with Glossy by the social media analytics company Dash Social paints a picture of which brands inspired the most social buzz this season.
Dash found that non-follower discovery drove most of the engagement growth and that non-follower views on Instagram doubled year over year.
“The common thread between top-performing brands at NYFW was intentional distribution,” said Jillian Robinson, director of global communications for Dash. “The brands that led the conversation understood that the runway is only the starting point. They were deliberate about how each moment would travel across celebrity networks, creator communities and platform-native formats. In today’s algorithm-driven environment, success is no longer driven by how often a brand posts for its own followers, but by how it engineers discovery across formats and signals.”
Here are the five brands that drove the most social engagement this week:
- Calvin Klein had the highest impact, according to Dash, with nearly 19,000 mentions on social media and 4.7 million engagements, making it the most talked about show of the week.
- Ralph Lauren also drove a lot of buzz, primarily from social content featuring celebrities including Lana Del Rey, Gigi Hadid and Anne Hathaway. The brand’s total social engagements were 3.4 million.
- Coach had 1.7 million engagements thanks to a livestream and brand ambassador Elle Fanning. Dash notes that Coach continues to have a particularly strong presence with Gen-Z customers.
- Carolina Herrera had 800,000 engagements thanks to leaning on creators and influencer partners.
- While Cult Gaia had lower engagement than these other brands, at 643,000 unique engagements, the moment when designer Jasmin Hekmat embraced her children at the end of the show was one of the most highly-shared single moments of the week on social.
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