During New York Fashion Week, Re.Stance emerged as a sensory departure where fashion, performance and art converged in a deliberate celebration of queer and BIPOC creativity. Presenting a tightly curated selection of designers, the showcase foregrounded voices whose work resonated most powerfully with the platform’s ethos. Here, clothing functioned as language rather than spectacle. It became a declaration of presence, memory and resistance.
Re.Stance rejects the disposability of trend cycles, reclaiming fashion through craft, community and conscious creation. It stands in opposition to systems built on overproduction and erasure, proposing instead a future shaped by intention. Founder Bianca Gittens conceived the platform as an act of reform, a space where collaboration replaces competition and sovereignty over craft returns to the hands that shape it.
At its core, Re.Stance resists speed and excess, honouring the slower processes of making and remaking. Garments emerge from reworked materials, ancestral techniques and ethical practices. Each piece is designed to endure both physically and symbolically. The platform champions circular design and BIPOC-led innovation through immersive showcases that blur the boundaries between runway, installation and performance. Sustainability here is inseparable from heritage. Preservation becomes a form of progress.
Lisa Jiang
Lisa Jiang merges fashion and illustration into garments that behave like living drawings. A Central Saint Martins graduate now based in London, her experience at ateliers including Iris van Herpen, Maison Margiela and Mary Katrantzou informs a practice rooted in motion and transformation. Drawing on fluid dynamics and kinetic sculpture, she constructs silhouettes that ripple and shift like smoke trails in air, organic yet precise. Her work becomes a choreography between body and garment. It is a study of movement made visible.
Alejandra Parra Parodi
New York–based Alejandra Parra Parodi channels Caribbean sensibility through the lens of her Colombian heritage, grounding her work in ritual, identity and craft. A Parsons MFA graduate and CFDA finalist, she approaches fashion as a means of reclaiming agency, examining how culture shapes the self. Her couture practice blends magical realism with meticulous Colombian techniques. Each piece carries the intimacy of storytelling, where memory and imagination meet in precise construction.
Evie Shaw designs for transformation. Based in New York, her ready-to-wear and couture collections balance ethereal femininity with modular construction, allowing garments to shift, reverse and adapt. Inspired by dance, cinema and nostalgia, her work invites movement and self-authorship. It encourages the wearer to become both subject and storyteller. The result is clothing that feels dreamlike yet deliberate, a wardrobe for those who treat style as an emotional language.
Kimberly Ortega
Ecuadorian interdisciplinary artist Kimberly Ortega works at the intersection of heritage and futurism, weaving traditional Andean craftsmanship into a contemporary non-binary design language. Influenced by Latin American ballroom culture and visual art, her silhouettes move with liberated confidence and celebrate self-expression through motion. Through her brand Soak, founded in Ecuador in 2021, Ortega champions environmentally conscious production using recycled materials, natural dyes and fair-trade collaborations with local artisans. Now based in New York while completing her MFA at Parsons, she continues to shape fashion as a space where identity, sustainability and cultural memory converge.
Korina Emmerich
Artist and designer Korina Emmerich founded EMME Studio in 2015 as an embodiment of slow fashion and cultural reclamation. Her vivid graphic work celebrates her paternal Indigenous heritage from the Puyallup Tribe and merges art, education and activism through clothing. With a steadfast commitment to social and climate justice, Emmerich challenges colonial narratives embedded within the industry. She uses colour and craftsmanship as tools of resistance. Her garments stand as declarations, unapologetic and deeply rooted in community.
Desiree Scarborough
Brooklyn–based artist and designer Desiree Scarborough creates at the intersection of travel, architecture and memory. Her practice transforms found materials into multifunctional works that blur the line between object and adornment. Some pieces can exist on a wall before moving onto the body. Collecting fragments from the communities she inhabits, she constructs sustainable artworks that function as physical archives of place. Each creation carries the quiet poetry of reinvention shaped by curiosity and instinct.
Martina Troya
Raised in Quito within her mother’s world of jewellery and design, Martina Troya learned early that craftsmanship carries emotion as much as form. Her work channels Ecuadorian heritage through a refined contemporary lens, balancing tradition with modernity through intentional, sustainable design. For Troya, creation is inherently collective. It is an invisible thread connecting every hand and story behind a finished piece. Each garment becomes a narrative object that honours the past while imagining a more conscious future shaped by collaboration.
Borinquen Gallo
Italian Puerto Rican Bronx–based artist Borinquen Gallo approaches fashion through sculpture, installation and community memory. Working primarily with repurposed materials, she constructs environments and wearable forms that interrogate beauty, social structures and cultural identity. Moving fluidly between art, education and activism, her work reclaims discarded matter to tell stories of resilience and diaspora. It transforms waste into monuments of belonging.
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Article: Astrid Kearney
Founder & Creative Direction: Bianca Gittens
Co-Producer: Hex Winters
Photographer: Kaylin Webster, Andres Paulino, Max Nova, Timothy Boll
Makeup Lead: Shannon Rodriguez
Hair Lead: Kayra Theodore
Illustrators: Drawing Cabaret Couture, Anna Huang, Cecilia Lehar, Gilly Lugo, Rosemary Coan
Stylists: Quanni Bell, Michelene Auguste, Nika Rokva