Fashion
New York Fashion Week Is Here. The Parties Have Some of Its Best Outfits.
New York Fashion Week officially begins on Friday but its ripple of parties across the city, where urban cowboys, indie sleaze-aspiring revelers and stylish, timeworn New Yorkers strut their stuff, has already begun. It’s not just vamping models and …
New York Fashion Week officially begins on Friday but its ripple of parties across the city, where urban cowboys, indie sleaze-aspiring revelers and stylish, timeworn New Yorkers strut their stuff, has already begun. It’s not just vamping models and eager spectators pumping out looks. Off the runways, a less curated (or at least carefully chosen to appear so) undercurrent takes over after sundown. See who was out and what they wore — updated throughout this week and next.
WEDNESDAY, Sept. 4
Vans Revives Max Fish with TV on The Radio
TV on the Radio’s Jaleel Bunton, left, and Tunde Adebimpe perform in a rare appearance.
A crowd in dad caps and baggy pants tagged graffiti onto glass doors, took mirror selfies with point-and-shoot digital cameras and danced as if it were the early 2000s — all beneath a giant cigarette.
Fashion month in New York was just getting started.
At a party in SoHo, Vans, the skater shoe company, had staged a revival of Max Fish — the Lower East Side dive bar beloved by creative types and downtown drifters that shuttered in 2020 — with a rare live performance from the rock band TV on the Radio. It was a tribute to a bygone New York and a reunion for its old guard: artists and bartenders wistful for an era of cheap rent and filthy bathrooms.
At first glance, the fashion could have been mistaken for the streetwear worn by patrons at the original bar on Ludlow Street, which once welcomed the likes of Johnny Depp, James Gandolfini and Taylor Mead alongside local plumbers.
“I don’t know what I’m wearing,” said Jaleel Bunton, who is a jack-of-all-trades musician for TV on the Radio and a former bartender at Max Fish. “Other than the Vans sneakers.”
(Mr. Bunton, who performs barefoot, promptly removed his shoes for the show.)
Around 10:30 p.m., the band’s lead singer, Tunde Adebimpe, howled onstage in front of a Max Fish simulacrum, designed to recreate the bar’s red awning, grimy toilet and dirty bathroom sink filled with detritus and sucked-dry cans of Modelo. Fans ate cones of popcorn and cheeseburger sliders and bounced their heads in nostalgia. (This week the band announced its first tour since 2019.)
Beneath Mr. Bunton’s lilac mohair cardigan was a white T-shirt with an orange cat with one tooth and “Garfeld,” a misspelling of the comic strip feline, splashed across the top.
“It’s like Garfield’s methy cousin,” Mr. Bunton said. “If that doesn’t say Max Fish tonight I don’t know what does.”
