There is a somewhat accepted trajectory in the fashion world that provocative new designers start out in London and cut their CSM-trained chops at dingy show venues before tantalising the world with their fledgling talent. As soon as they’ve solidified that attention into say (hopefully) monetisable hype, they leave. To make money brands go to New York, for prestige they go to Paris. It isn’t often that it works the other way around. But Carly Mark, the 36-year-old Detroit-born, New York-made designer of the cult brand Puppets and Puppets is bucking the system in more ways than one.
Classified as a ‘downtown darling’ by Vanessa Friedman, fashion director of The New York Times, Mark’s brand, which she launched in 2018, offered a punkish uniform for her coterie of like-minded, similarly cast zeitgeisty faces: Julia Fox, writer Miranda July and Lena Dunham are friends and fans. As is Ella Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s fashion fawned-over stepdaughter, who took one of Mark’s signature motif ‘Cookie’ bags to the Democratic National Convention last month, causing a rush for the piece. ‘Everything’s always changing depending on the internet,’ says Mark. ‘She posted herself wearing it [on Instagram] and overnight my sales skyrocketed.’ Yet, even her cult-status, snack-derived handbags, CFDA (NY’s version of our Fashion Awards) nominations and a Fashion Trust award couldn’t keep her afloat in New York.
Earlier this year, she announced (to some consternation) that she was closing down the ready to wear side of her business, focusing on accessories and moving to London. After a summer flitting between here and Paris, with a stint back home with family in Detroit, she’s packed up her West Village apartment and is, for now, at The Standard hotel while she finds her feet, sets up for her London Fashion Week presentation and works out the red tape to bringing over her rescue Chihuahua, Puppet, after whom the brand is named.
Of her NY exit, she highlights the chasm between the established, big players and fledgling designers. ‘The divide is very wide,’ she explains. ‘It creates limits. You can do anything in New York, that’s what’s exciting about America, if you want to do something crazy you do it. But in Europe you see young designers getting hired to creative direct houses. That does not happen in New York. Fashion is hard everywhere, but I feel there are more opportunities for growth in Europe — part of that is because the cost of living in New York City has become ridiculous.’
Underscoring the difficulties of being a start-up fashion brand, Mark says her bills for running her studio and paying her small staff hit around $1.5million (£1.2m) a year; in sales she was generating around $1m. ‘I made calls to people who could potentially invest,’ she says of the six months she spent hoping to make it work. ‘I just got to the point where I [knew] no one’s coming to save me.’ She publicly and vocally explained why she was ‘finding a new way to do this’, hoping that in highlighting a broken system, things might change. ‘I felt it was important to be honest in a business where you were encouraged to keep up the optics.’ After all, if a feted, buzzy new name on the show schedule can’t make it work, who can?
She made the call then to focus on accessories. Her handbags hit a shopping sweet spot — a small Cookie bag is £275, a crystal-covered party bag is around £600. She’s offering cool-girl status at a price her Gen Z audience can afford. In the face of the astronomical cost of superbrand luxury accessories, she’s shrewdly upending an unaffordable trend. Even more shrewdly she has enlisted the help of Katie Hillier, the British accessories supremo whose Midas touch and has been responsible for many of the handbags you’ve lusted over for the past 20 years.
Working with Hillier’s team in Shoreditch, alongside pit stops at Rochelle Canteen (Jolene and Hampstead Heath are also favourites) showed her that a London existence might also work for her. Mark’s fashion shows — which often mined specific, niche references and flitted aesthetically each season — meant that her clothes were perhaps harder to place for those who weren’t ardent fans or in search of something new and provocative. Small, fledgling orders for her ready to wear ensured that she was beholden to producing in factories in and around New York, which meant that the prices were high and out of sync with the accessories offer.
But young labels need time to grow, something which the punishing, existing fashion system doesn’t always allow, in spite of how many accolades and breathy reviews one might receive. Puppets is the opposite of the post pandemic stealth wealth movement; one collection took its colourful cue from Moebius’s imagined costumes for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s never-made Dune film. ‘It was really, really weird,’ she laughs, ‘I looked back on it and was like, “What did I just do?” But that’s what Puppets has always been about.’
That show did, however, birth the Cookie bag, which has become a lucrative signature encapsulating the wry sense of humour that underpins her designs. Mark originally conceived of the cookie as a motif on a round belt buckle. ‘It was an absurd, silly idea that I liked.’ She asked an artist friend if they could create a resin chocolate chip cookie. ‘It was perfect and I thought, I have to make more of these and put them on a handbag. Everyone likes black handbags, and everyone likes chocolate chip cookies. I saw it as a punk object, I thought of the Telfar bag or Tory [Burch] or any bag with a logo on it. It’s a moving campaign for that brand. All bags are the same, it’s just a different picture on the front right? Wouldn’t it be absurd if instead of having a Puppets logo, I put a cookie. It’s making fun of fashion, it’s meta.’
She conceived of Puppets after she turned 30, having spent her 20s carving out a not unsuccessful career as an artist, creating work that, like her fashion, tended to skirt around pop culture with a kinky Warholian edge — Haribo bear-inspired wallpaper and bear-shaped butt plugs featured in one solo show. At 30 she found that ‘the art world was too nonsensical. The relationships are often arbitrary. There’s a meandering to it that I was having trouble organising in my brain. It’s the wild west of business, but I needed it to make a bit more sense.’
Mark comes from a line of strong matriarchs, whom she cites as informing her world view in both a creative and business-savvy sense. Her mother heads up the docent programme at Detroit Institute of Arts; her grandmother was the formidable Florine Mark, former Weight Watchers president and CEO, and one of the company’s first major investors. Sadly, her grandmother — with whom she was close and had cast as a model in one of her pre-collections — passed away 11 months ago. Her parents and two sisters (she is the middle child) and their children are all back in Detroit.
‘Losing her was emotionally very difficult,’ she confides, ‘I’m definitely making an effort to get on a plane to be with them as much as possible.’ But before spending Halloween back home and taking her niece to Disneyland, Mark has the small matter of her first London Fashion Week presentation, and a collaboration with all-American sneaker brand Keds to launch. ‘I’m a baby-steps type of person, if I think too hard about the ultimate goal, I get freaked out. But, it’s a very different kind of show than I’ve ever done before, it’s more like performance. That’s exciting. It’s either going to be cool and great or it’s going to suck.’
