SC103 Spring 2022 Ready-to-Wear

The fashion industry can be cruel to the independents: those making by hand, working in small communities, and holding each other together with passion and craft. It’s why designers like Susan Cianciolo and Miguel Adrover haven’t, decades later, really gotten their flowers—but I feel certain fashion will (and must) pay attention to SC103. Sophie Andes-Gascon and Claire McKinney are spiritual descendents of Adrover, actual students of Cianciolo, and mentees of New York’s newer generation of independent thinkers and makers like Eckhaus Latta. Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “In America: A Lexicon of Fashion” exhibition, one SC103 piece is grouped with their peers in a room largely about offbeat creativity; another opens the show. SC103 is, by my count, one of only four brands with two installations included in the entire exhibition—the others are no less than Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs, and Heron Preston. “Being in the show,” says Andes-Gascon, “gave us the encouragement to make beautiful things and to move forward.”

And they are moving leaps and bounds. “This season, we did a deep dive into personal nostalgia,” Andes-Gascon says. “The Met brought up feelings about how we started making things; I was remembering techniques that I started when I was growing up.” The duo usually mine the style of their young New York peers to create easy, useful garments; the decision to plumb the depths of their own psyches has pushed them to strange, bizarre, and beautiful new ends.

Take a lacy florette top, which Andes-Gascon says is inspired by the florette tops she used to make (and hate) as a teen. Or a black corduroy miniskirt with a high slit, fastened by a piece of jewelry from McKinney’s grandmother. As two twenty-somethings, they also have the vantage point of living through the Y2K era—so hot for both Millennials and TikTokers right now—but their versions of aughts nostalgia come in the form of shocking pink denim tops sprayed with silver and thin, belt-like minis made of patchworked fabric, more textural and uncanny than the literal send-ups popular in Milan.

Nostalgia isn’t even the right word; while Andes-Gascon are looking backward, they are constantly pushing forward. Almost the entire collection is made from deadstock or upcycled scraps; Sophie hand-knit wisps of leather leftover from their popular linked bags into a sporty, varsity-style vest. Even something as mind-numbing in the hands of other designers, like casual trousers, is a thoughtful piece made from T-shirt scraps and tailored to fit all of their friends across gender and body type. For now, they will probably be the only ones to wear them; the pair design, knit, and sew every single item themselves in their apartment. (Even the bags stocked at national retailers like Nordstrom are hand-linked by the duo.) To build a business they will have to figure out how to grow, but I think they’re at once wise and firm enough to progress without ever losing their singular touch. Maybe the secret is to do it together. The two words curator Andrew Bolton has assigned to them in his exhibit: gratitude and connection.