Bryn Taubensee will discuss how the fashion industry has changed dramatically in the past ten years—since the rise of social media—allowing young people to captivate a wide audience more easily than ever before. She will discuss these changes and the opportunities that this change has brought, as well as the realities of starting a small fashion business and the constant push and pull between creative freedom and commercial pressure. Additionally, she will discuss the fashion industry at large in New York City: what it realistically has to offer, how to find a niche within it, and what it means to be a fashion designer in 2023.
Taubensee graduated from Indiana University’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design in 2014 with a B.A. in Fashion Design and a B.F.A. in Studio Art (sculpture). After graduating, she moved to New York City, and in 2016, she co-founded the ready-to-wear brand Vaquera with her friend and collaborator Patric Dicaprio. Vaquera has since grown into one of the most buzzy young brands in the fashion industry and receives consistent accolades from top critics and editors such as Cathy Horyn (The Cut), Nicole Phelps (director of Vogue Runway), and Vanessa Friedman (The New York Times).
Vaquera showed on the official New York Fashion Week schedule from 2017–2020, before moving to the official Paris Fashion Week schedule, where they now show every Spring Summer and Fall Winter season. The brand was a finalist in the CFDA/Vogue Fashion fund in 2017 and has been featured in three of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Costume Institute Exhibitions. In 2020, Vaquera partnered with Dover Street Market Paris and Comme des Garcons, from whom they receive business mentorship and assistance. With the help of DSMP and CDG, Vaquera has become a formidable brand with nearly 70 stockists worldwide.
Taubensee and Vaquera’s work was deemed “anti-fashion” early in its beginnings. Still often referred to as an “enfant terrible” in the fashion industry, Vaquera’s collections are consistently punky, controversial, humorous, and not always easy to imagine wearing. Models storm seemingly aggressively down the runway, lingerie is worn on top of clothing, some garments are backless, and many of the clothes appear to fit either too large or too small. And yet it is this energy and spirit for which Vaquera is best known and loved.
Vaquera was born out of a rebellion against the commercialization of the fashion industry, a rebellion against mindless, easy-to-digest, mass-produced clothing - and it is an attempt to bring Fashion back to fashion. That is, designs which make you question, which repel you slightly, but leave you wanting more—and ultimately, which reflect the society around us and drive the fashion industry forward. Why attempt perfection when imperfection is so much more interesting?
