the twentyten - designers to know

Jeff Dodd, Nina Zilka and David J. Krause who comprise the twentyten met each other at the Pratt Institute and began designing together. According to their site, the twentyten creates architectural shapes that flatter the wearer’s body. their aesthetic has a sculptural focus, yet a wearable ease. their mission as designers is to create interesting, architectural garments that still maintain an ease and comfortability. the twentyten's designs are for the woman and man who always like to look sophisticated, but never look like they tried too hard to get there.

Earlier this week they had a showing of their most recent collection at the Envoy Gallery on Christie Street. The models lined all four walls of the back room as living sculptures with highly stylized hair and makeup. The clothes were primarily black and white with occasional hot pink or slate blue accents. There was an interesting juxtaposition of delicacy seen in transparent and draping fabric contrasted with garments like a skirt literally edged with nails. It felt like clothes for this moment that also succeed in riding above any trends thus remaining timeless.

Nina kindly answered a few questions for Style Defined:
I know you met at Pratt but how did you end up working together?

David and I became friends really early on because we both shared an appreciation for more avant-garde fashion, although David was more into vintage at the time, and I think my work skewed a bit girlier. And we both admired one of Jeff's final pieces for our end of year review, and when we asked him about it he had some weirdo answer about being inspired by Dildos. So I think we all knew we'd be friends. And then one of my best friends Mariel invited me to do some pieces for a project she was working on in Mexico City, and asked if my two close friends (the boys) would want to be involved. We started designing pieces together for that show, which didn't end up happening, but morphed into something a lot more exciting, when we realized that we love working together, and with three of us designing a piece with all of our input, the work was even better than any of us alone.

And now we all live together, which makes it really easy to wake up and start designing.

Is there a particular process to your collaboration?

Yes, everyone’s favorite question. We usually start with a really large piece of paper, and sit around it. David usually is holding the pencil and doing most of the drawing, because he’s hands down the best illustrator of any of us (he did the illustration on our invitation). We start talking about what we’re really feeling at that moment, or things we’ve been excited about lately. This collection all started with the desire to make garments where we could pull the hems up and unto the shoulder. And we really wanted to have these straps everywhere, which disappeared for a bit, and then came back in the men’s jacket with the blackstrap and our nail harness. We’ll say, ok, we have three shirts drawn. We need a skirt and at least one pant now. And then usually we create our really wearable pieces first, and then leave a full day each for some of our weirder pieces which we build organically.

What thoughts/ideas/concepts inspired your current collection?

Again, the desire to make these pieces where the hem turned into a strap that could be worn on the shoulder, or around the neck, like our shoulder dress, the drape gowns, and the men’s knit drape tank (which makes an awesome minidress, by the way). Also, this idea of industrial wreckage. We found all these old nails, which were free, and used them in our nail harness and the make out guard…thriftiness often drives our creative process. And as always, we love the juxtaposition of drape and structure, as in our snail dresses, and the coral skirt. We’re always inspired by that.
How does being in NYC influence you? (Or your creative process)

New York is a very expensive city. We spend most of our day figuring out a way to spend the least amount of money, which New York City makes hard. But it has pushed us to do things that have ended up being very cool, like our tights over shoe look we’ve done the past two seasons. No one knows how cheap those shoes were; now they just look cool. Well, now people will know. Also, we can’t really afford a hair person, so we’ve made hats/head covering the last two seasons and sewn in fake hair to keep our cost down. But the effect is pretty nice.

Anything else you want to add?

Thanks for coming to our show!

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