On September 13, in a church gymnasium on East 14th Street, 35-year-old Carly Mark, looking like a Bob Fosse dancer in sheer tights pulled over a printed leotard, jogged out after her New York Fashion Week runway show to awe and applause. Though Mark is from Detroit, she’s the rare, real-deal New York designer. She’s been entrenched in the city’s art scene since she moved to Manhattan in the mid-aughts to attend the School of Visual Arts. From model selection to musical guests (her September show opened with music by Jazz Ajilo, a well-known subway sax player), she infuses her brand, Puppets and Puppets, with the strange spirit of the city.
In the world of fashion, Puppets and Puppets is a lodestar, a luxury brand with personality, clever designs, and cultish devotion from people who inspire their own cultish devotion, such as Lena Dunham, Julia Fox, and Richie Shazam. It’s because Mark knows what women want, which is to be like her. “There’s a fandom around brands. That’s what moves clothes,” Mark tells me. “This has to be about me, because when it’s not, the buyers don’t believe it, the customers don’t believe it, and the clothes don’t sell.” She’s cool to the point of being terrifying, and as smart as she is bizarre. “If I don’t like it when I put it on, this isn’t going to work.” She pauses. “I really became the puppet master.”
In 2018, Mark started Puppets and Puppets with Ayla Argentina, who is no longer with the brand, as a reprieve from the freedom of being an artist. “Before I went into fashion, I just knew I wanted to leave the art world,” Mark says. Her Pop-art sculptures and paintings were displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, among other venues. As an artist, “time is unstructured, people are insane,” she explains. “Some people love that freedom, but I don’t.”
She built Puppets and Puppets—which is named after her chihuahua, Puppet, but which also speaks to the tug-of-war between designers and consumers—with friends turned collaborators, and collaborators turned friends. Now her clothes are stocked everywhere from Ssense and Maimoun to Nordstrom and Selfridges. This fall marked her second nomination for the C.F.D.A.’s emerging designer of the year award.
Mark’s designs are whimsical. Her spring-summer 2024 collection is inspired by Japanese ghost stories and the feeling of being haunted. There’s a great T-shirt featuring an out-of-focus The Silence of the Lambs poster that’s definitely going to sell out. Mark sent models down the runway carrying silky red dresses between their teeth. One model carried a banana in a leather harness.
In the world of Puppets and Puppets, a banana bag is par for the course. Mark loves playing with food and has an affinity for chefs. Recently, while reading Anthony Bourdain, Mark realized that “every chef I know cooks all this beautiful food, and then they go and eat at Taco Bell. It’s like, I don’t want to think about fancy food. I want something brainless and easy.” She feels the same way about shopping and dressing up. “I like wearing Brandy Melville sweatpants. I love Skims…. I’ll wear a sneaker or a really, really embarrassingly beat-up Manolo, a vintage T-shirt, and a cookie bag.”
That cookie bag is the purse of the moment, a playful black bag with a bejeweled chocolate-chip cookie stuck in the middle. Mark’s irreverent artistic lean—cracked eggs dripping from the toes of pumps, cheese-wedge heels—comes from her first life as a contemporary artist. Her mastery of cultural chiaroscuro carries through to her designs, which balance luxury with the humor and everyday drama of life.
It’s impossible to picture Mark staying still, because the puppet master keeps moving strings. “I don’t think fashion designers should be fashion designers their whole lives. I think you have to be deeply enmeshed in the Zeitgeist in order to do this.” Her ideal next step: “I’ll be just some old weirdo who makes creatures.”
The girls below 14th Street are all Mark’s creatures. She isn’t just in the Zeitgeist; she’s creating it. “I always say Puppets [and Puppets] is like, I’m making fun of you, but you’re in on the joke. And I’m making fun of me, and you’re in on the joke.”
Nicolaia Rips is a screenwriter, an editor, a senior features writer for HommeGirls, and the author of Trying to Float: Coming of Age in the Chelsea Hotel