Orlando Sentinel (Sunday)

Could Detroit become the next fashion city?

Sisters aim to show creative side of their hometown in exhibit

- By Jessica Iredale

“I think our landlord is like, ‘What are you guys doing?’ ” said Cassidy Tucker, sitting alongside her sister Kelsey on a Zoom call from their Detroit studio last week. Surroundin­g them was a pileup of 50 pieces of original artwork, with several 8-foot-by-4foot mural-like sculptures meant to approximat­e the pages of a giant storybook. The art was to be squeezed into the 26-foot truck they’d rented to haul the lot from Detroit to New York City for an exhibition called “Don’t Sleep on Detroit.”

Cassidy, 27, and Kelsey, 25, are the founders of Deviate, a playful, unisex streetwear and workwear fashion line that was introduced in late 2018 and is produced entirely in Detroit. The sisters so love and believe in the creative energy in their hometown that their entire business model is built around nurturing and sharing it.

They recruited more than 50 local artists — fashion and textile designers, muralists, painters, graphic artists and ceramists — to contribute work to the “Don’t Sleep on Detroit” showcase, which will also act as Deviate’s fall 2022 fashion presentati­on.

The idea behind the exhibition, which was held in New York recently as a press and industry event, is a basic Mohammed/mountain conceit: Bring the creative world of Detroit to the big leagues. The showcase will return to Detroit and open to the public later this year.

Detroit has long been in the fashion orbit. The highly influentia­l retailer Linda Dresner, credited for bringing the likes of Jil Sander, Martin Margiela

and Comme des Garçons to the United States, ran stores in New York and Birmingham, Michigan — about a half-hour from Detroit — for decades. Tracy Reese, one of the few Black designers to be a mainstay on the New York scene, moved back to Detroit in 2019 to start her sustainabl­e collection, Hope for Flowers. Carhartt, the workwear brand that has become increasing­ly tied to street and hype fashion, was founded in Detroit in 1889.

In the past year or so, interest in Detroit has been rekindled by global players: Gucci introduced a collaborat­ion with the hometown label Detroit Vs. Everybody, founded by Tommey Walker Jr., for a capsule collection of T-shirts and announced the opening of a new store in downtown Detroit; Hermès opened a store in the city; and in October Bottega Veneta

staged what would be creative director Daniel Lee’s last fashion show for the house in Detroit.

In March, Michigan’s first historical­ly Black college, the former Lewis College of Business, is reopening as the Pensole Lewis College of Business & Design, focusing on design.

“When people think of Detroit, they don’t think of a lot of the positivity that the city has to offer,” said Cassidy Tucker. “It’s often overshadow­ed with some of the more sensationa­lized components of its history — struggle, triumph, struggle.”

The New York showcase is set up as a storybook written by Kelsey Tucker, Deviate’s creative director, titled “A Bird Trusts Its Wings.” A metaphor for nontraditi­onal creative careers, the story follows the main character who, mired in self-doubt, wakes

up in an animated world to which all of her ideas have been exiled to live out the rest of their days.

Upon revisiting and interactin­g with them, she realizes she wants to share them with the world. If the story provides a dreamy backdrop for the showcase, the subtext of it is scrappy DIY tenacity.

“There is always a lot of pressure, like: ‘You should be here. You should be doing this,’ ” Kelsey Tucker said of her decision to choose to forge a path off the well-trodden routes to fashion capitals like New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris. “The showcase is really us putting our foot down and being like, ‘We can do this from Detroit and bring it to you.’ ”

Kelsey Tucker studied fashion design at Wayne State University in midtown Detroit. After an internship at Vera Wang in Los Angeles, she realized

she wasn’t interested in big brand work. “What I learned the most is that fashion is a grind,” she said. “Whatever you do in this life is a grind, but you have to choose your lane.”

Hers was going home and teaming up with her sister, who, after graduating from Princeton, had been involved with a ride-sharing startup called Splt and wanted to get involved in social entreprene­urship.

“We were on a mission to put Detroit on the fashion map,” Cassidy Tucker said.

How to do that? They had no idea. They started by reaching out to people in the community, amassing mentors including Reese. There’s also Christina Chen, who handles public relations for Deviate and has fashion experience at Saint Laurent, Alexander Wang, Shinola and StockX, and Ben Ewy, the vice president for design, research and developmen­t at Carhartt.

An eco-consciousn­ess is built into Deviate’s ethos — the Tuckers produce nearly everything locally and use scraps of material to trim their garments when they can — but the social impact component is bigger. Kelsey mentioned the Antwerp Six, Motown and the Wu-Tang Clan as collective­s that started in overlooked places and amplified their talents through the power in numbers.

Deviate has also teamed up with the Industry Club of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Southeaste­rn Michigan to provide paid internship­s. And last year, the company initiated the Lost Artists Collective: a series of house parties requiring artists to bring a piece of their work to get in (they could leave with someone else’s) that has become community resource and was the starting point for “Don’t Sleep on Detroit.”

Marlo Broughton, 34, a painter and illustrato­r who helped introduce Detroit Vs. Everybody with his cousin Walker, first heard from Kelsey and Cassidy via a direct message, inviting him to one of the artist collective’s house parties and then to participat­e in the showcase. “They showed me everything and had a whole blueprint,” he said.

The sisters also contacted Sydney James, 42, a muralist and fine artist, who contribute­d a photo of her 8,000-squarefoot mural, “Girl With the D Earring,” a reinterpre­tation of the Vermeer painting “Girl With a Pearl Earring,” featuring a Black woman wearing an earring dangling Detroit’s signature Old English D.

“I didn’t necessaril­y understand what it was, but I liked the ‘why,’ ” James said of being approached for the showcase. “It’s like, ‘We’re going to make them look at us.’ ”

 ?? ELAINE CROMIE/THE NEW YORK TIMES ?? Kelsey, left, and Cassidy Tucker, co-founders of the fashion line Deviate, on Jan. 26 in Detroit. In bringing an exhibition to New York, the fashion label wants to show what Detroit has to offer.
ELAINE CROMIE/THE NEW YORK TIMES Kelsey, left, and Cassidy Tucker, co-founders of the fashion line Deviate, on Jan. 26 in Detroit. In bringing an exhibition to New York, the fashion label wants to show what Detroit has to offer.

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