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SC103 Is Poised to Become Every New York City Art Girl’s Favorite New Brand - Vogue

Posted: 21 Feb 2020 12:28 PM PST

Just a couple days before debuting her second collection as SC103 at a small gallery in the Lower East Side, designer Sophie Andes Gascon was instinctively knitting together a colorful bunch of thick fabric in the living room of her Crown Heights apartment. She had just moved here a few months ago with roommate and SC103's other designer half, Claire McKinney. Droning zither music played in the background, which only made the all-white room—empty but for a few plants scattered about—feel more austere.

All the pieces from their new collection were hanging from a rack in the center of the room. There were bold knits that look like they had shrunk in the wash; deadstock denim pants that are woven in different striped patterns (the raw denim pieces fall under McKinney's purview mostly); and their signature interlocking-leather-link totes and dresses. It's these linked pieces, a meticulous web of little interlaced leather circles that are made from scrap materials, that inspired the name of the debut collection they showed last fall: Bonds.

"We were playing with the idea of these links that we'd started and the bond that Claire and I share," Gascon said. The design duo met while they were both design students at Pratt, and they've been roommates ever since—they chose the name SC103 based off the apartment they shared postcollege, which is where their collaboration officially started. Since then, their work has made appearances on Maryam Nassir Zadeh's runway (they design and produce pieces for her shows) and at Café Forgot, the ultimate shopping experience for in-the-know girls who want their clothes to toe the line between full-out art objects and pure fashion.

Photo: Andres Altamirano

Photo: Taylor Herman

Their first collection was presented last fall at the 80WSE Gallery near Washington Square Park, and artists Bobbi Salvör Menuez, Audrey Wollen, and Aria Dean each moonlighted as models for the occasion. Afterward, the clothes were displayed, like art objects, for a month in the gallery's windows. For the current collection, shown last week after the close of New York Fashion Week, the pair chose another art gallery—this time on the Lower East Side. Though many fashion editors were on their way to London by that point, the crowd that came to watch the show spilled out onto the street. The band Corduroi (whose members are friends of the designers) played covers of '90s alt hits by the likes of Weezer and Nirvana. The models ascended from the steep basement stairs, walked through the gallery, and finished by strutting on the adjacent strip of sidewalk outside. Gascon described their first collection as a bit frenzied, but they pared down their aesthetic with their follow-up. "When I look at this new collection compared to the last one, there's a real serene quality to it," Gascon said.

McKinney (who is the production manager for Maryam Nassir Zadeh and who teaches fashion design at Pratt) and Gascon (a design developer at Ulla Johnson) have been roommates for eight years. Their brand name SC103 is an amalgamation of their first names and the house number of their old apartment in Clinton Hill, where they lived for six years. Their landlords, a touchy, older couple who had purchased the property 30 years ago, occupied the apartment below. "We kind of felt like we were our landlords' children in a way," McKinney said. She was not able to use her sewing machine in the evenings because it was above their bedroom. "I had a sewing curfew," McKinney recalled with a laugh.