Freshly nominated for a 2023 CFDA Award for American accessory designer of the year, Brandon Blackwood has many tricks up his sleeve, teasing a new outerwear collection on TikTok with a digital fashion show during New York Fashion Week.
“I wanted this to be a show everyone could attend,” Blackwood explained of choosing to show on social media. “It’s a relatively small outerwear collection, so doing a whole production seemed wasteful. A virtual show allowed me to have more fun with the visuals while allowing more people to view the collection.”
The show clocked more than 1,000 views when it went live on Monday night, with viewers hyped for the fall drop of the brand. Blackwood is known for his bags with a cult following, adding footwear earlier this year, and now a proper outerwear expansion is the natural next chapter. According to his show notes, the fall inspiration stemmed from finding the perfect medium between sophisticated staples with strong construction and focused on creating pieces that embody a powerful woman mixed with the grittiness of New York street style.
The digital fashion show saw a small group of powerful woman stomping though a brutalist industrial space, each in a new coat style, including a short ink blue puffer with logo details, a sandy hued puffy trench, a black technical parka and more. “We put stories of heroic women with somewhat taboo stories on our mood board,” he said of his show inspiration. “What would a present-day Giulia Tofana wear during a winter in NYC? Dark, strong, confident, powerful, and a little scandalous.”
He pairs the new coats with handbags — of course — using innovative textures like a patented tweed snakeskin, which Blackwood noted took months to perfect.
When asked about his muse for fall, he looked close to home: “I constantly tell my team to think of the ‘dream version’ of themselves. We all have an ideal version of who we want to be. A perfect version of ourselves. That’s who we’re dressing, that’s who we are creating for. A heightened understanding of the very people we already are. This is limitless, as we all have different desires. That prompt gave us so much to pull from.”
Already generating buzz on social media — just like his sell out bags — the outerwear drops in October.
