Puppets and Puppets Resort 2024
Puppets and Puppets designer Carly Mark says she is too strange to swim with the stream for very long.
Since founding her brand in 2019, the designer has endured an emotional and creative struggle to balance her particular visual language with the needs of running a business.
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At times, Mark said, she felt lost in the equation — bending to commercial desires and sacrificing the artistic expression that got her into fashion in the first place.
In a bid to rebalance some of that, Puppets and Puppets revealed its first resort collection on Tuesday in New York — photographed in Mark’s apartment, on one of her best friends, the model Jane Moseley, as well as her grandmother Florine Mark, the former chief executive officer of Weight Watchers.
What resort affords Puppets, Mark said, was a bigger buyers’ budget — a way toward posting sales growth while sticking to more of her creative guns.
“It’s really about me and getting back to me and getting back to what I love and what I care about. I love strangeness,” added Mark.
For resort, Mark looked around at the things closest to her — like the city she lives in and the restaurants she frequents. She leaned into her cheeky view of classic New York with sequin dresses in uptown grande dame floral prints and a leopard faux fur in a fuzzy thrift store texture that nods to her quirky, high-low lifestyle in the big city. There were also mesh onesies and dresses printed with an AI rendering of Mister Chow. “I like Mr. Chow. And, you know, I was just thinking of funny parts of my life and how that would apply to a collection about me,” she said.
Mark also took resort as an opportunity for spring cleaning. She downsized office spaces, changed her business management team and is now partnering with Christopher Peters, formerly of Creatures of the Wind and now of his own line CDLM, to help design the collection with her. “It feels like coming home,” she said.
Launch Gallery: Puppets and Puppets Resort 2024
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