First transgender designer shows collection at New York Fashion Week
Los Angeles designer Pierre Davis made her debut at the ongoing New York Fashion Week, becoming the first openly transgender creator to present a collection at the fashion week, shaking up an event further that had already featured trans models.
The Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), which says it represents more than 500 creators and has made diversity its battle cry, announced that Davis’s No Sesso brand will be ‘making NYFW history’ at the event, which opened with a parade of whimsical garments.
Davis told CFDA that she hopes the brand ‘will inspire people to be more communityminded and to realise that not everything is just about aesthetics or commerce. It’s also about humanity’. She adds that it is important ‘that people of all intersectional identities are given a fighting chance, regardless of their identity. The playing field isn’t level in the world, and it is even more difficult in fashion’.While, she embraces her identity as a trans woman in the design field, Davis doesn’t want it to be a gimmick.
“I just want to show the work,” she says about No Sesso, which was launched in 2015 and counts fans, including R&B artists Kelela and Erykah Badu. “I am just humble and happy that I got to show at fashion week,” Davis said.
For her Chapter 2 collection — she calls them chapters rather than seasons — Davis came up with the idea of a wardrobe that blends the sartorial codes associated with the two sexes.
For several years, trans models have regularly appeared at New York Fashion Week, and in September 2017 Calvin Klein featured a 16-yearold trans model. Last September Marco Marco, another Los Angeles designer, went further with a podium showing trans models.