The party outside the party
Hanging out in the parking lot with the clothesmaking visionaries of SC103
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The NYC clothing line SC103, much like Blackbird Spyplane, is a small, two-person miracle. The line was founded in 2019 by Claire McKinney and Sophie Andes-Gascon, who met as fashion students at Pratt, and soon became collaborators and roommates — the label’s name draws from their initials and the address of the Brooklyn apartment they shared for ten years.
They dropped a hit early on called the Links tote: a one-of-one unisex bag, made from colorful, hand-linked leather scraps, that took them a year to figure out how to construct. The Links became a downtown totem — we called it one of the 35 Iconic Designs of the Spyplane Era — and today it’s stocked in shops as disparate as Dover Street Market and Nordstrom.
SC103 have been a beacon to me (Erin) for years now, way beyond the bags, thanks to their love of print, pattern and embellishment. They started out cutting one-of-a-kind pieces from found fabrics and what their best clothes all still have in common is a patchwork spirit, full of improvisation and play. They might embed a vintage scarf into the neckline of a shirt to create a kind of modified cowl neck, then fix some ribbon to it with a silver button for a spray of fringe down the front. They once took a simple black crewneck sweatshirt, festooned it with real pressed flowers, then laminated it in plastic. What do you even call their cropped and padded silk Opus jackets, quilted to resemble trippy topographical maps, dripping in untrimmed threads? Bombers? Liner jackets? Evening coats?
The results blur the line between clothes and art objects, and while the clothes can flirt with mess and chaos, they never lapse into either, thanks to some uncanny gift Sophie and Claire have for balance, proportion and color. Two of SC103’s designs are in The Met’s permanent collection. Last year they figured heavily into two gallery shows, at FIT’s “The New Village” exhibit (about the contemporary downtown scene, I wrote it about here) and NYC’s Theta, which hosted a show devoted to their work. Years ago, Stand Up Comedy’s Diana Kim hired Claire to work at her store, and she stocked clothes from Sophie’s thesis collection. Claire worked for Maryam Nassir Zadeh for 7 years, too, and she and Sophie got paid by the piece to make clothes for MNZ runway shows. Susan Cianciolo — the ur-artist-designer, whose torch they are carrying — taught Claire at Pratt and was an early patron of SC103.
All of which means I was stoked to tap in with Sophie and Claire the other day, hitting them via encrypted SpyLink at their Red Hook studio. They told me about how the leather gets linked; the surprising sum Ssense owes them; the imminent opening of their Chinatown flagship store, in a BBSP Breaking News Exclusive; why they keep their runway shows open to all; and more.
Blackbird Spyplane: Your runway shows don’t look or feel like anyone else’s. You held the last one, for SS26, at night in this huge parking lot in Brooklyn, full of people sitting on gravel or leaning against all these big-rig trucks. There’s this sense of being drawn in, which I get with your designs, too, whereas so much of fashion is about pushing people out. It feels like a crowd just gathered on the street, curious what’s happening…
Sophie Andes-Gascon: “We tell people to bring a friend or to spread the news that the show is happening, but we don’t really publicly post that it’s happening ahead of time. Word just kind of spreads.”
Claire McKinney: “We’ll get emails and DMs asking if we’re having a show and it’s always like, Yes, here’s the invite. We have an open-door policy for our shows, so anyone can come. There’s no PR or list. You don’t have to tell anyone who you are, and we always try to schedule them at times that our friends and community can come to, either on the weekend, or in the evening after work.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Craft is such a big part of what you do. There’s so much of the hand visible in the clothes. Where do your designs start? Do you sketch? Mess around with fabric? Is it about building from a single element — some special ribbon you found, or a button — and figuring out what piece to make around it?
Claire: “Usually there’s some sort of fabric already in mind. Our collections are focused on certain groups of fabrics, mostly natural fibers — things that work in cotton, things that work in different weights of silk that we use every season.
“When it comes to designing shapes and silhouettes, I don’t sketch at all, really. We’re not people that build out big reference boards or mood boards, either. I like to let whatever ideas I come across get twisted and abstracted in my mind — not by screenshotting them, or printing them out and looking at them, but just by absorbing what I can and then letting it do its thing in my head.
“From there, it’s just scissors cutting into fabric, maybe using one of our previous patterns as a template, and free-cutting away from that. Some of our favorite days ever are just about getting lost in making things and sewing with no time limit.”
Sophie: “We make a lot of lists with these phrases and words that would make no sense to anyone but us. We’ve realized we have a shared language, and a weird telepathy you only get when you spend enough time with someone. There are a lot of ideas that come out of that.”
Blackbird Spyplane: From those initial ideas, how do the clothes actually get made?
Claire: “We work with two really small garment-district factories — one of them has four employees, the other has maybe six — and a couple other people in the garment district that do things like marking and grading. I manage the production. One of the factories we work with, I’ve known them for over 12 years. So those are our clothing partners, and then Sophie and I still do production ourselves in our studio in Red Hook. We designate different styles that each of us cuts and sews for our store orders — usually those are the more special, one-of-a-kind-esque pieces.”
Sophie: “During handbag production, we have two women that come help make bags for a few weeks, who’ve been with us for, like, 3 years. They come on board twice a year, and they’re incredible. Plus some really helpful interns, usually from Pratt, during show season: They get internships through the school and help us with runway pieces. They do hand work, beading and shoe-making for the shows.”
Blackbird Spyplane: So much of your early work was about recycling vintage and deadstock fabrics and trimmings, and reworking cast-off clothing. How much is that part of it now?
Claire: “At the beginning we were only using deadstock leather for the bags, and cuts with slight discrepancies or other things about them that were considered faulty, but now we use new leather, too. And some of our earlier collections incorporated a lot more pre-existing materials because we’d been collecting materials for a decade by that point — just saying yes to any donation of any fabric that anyone had. We stockpiled a lot of s--t for a long time. Then we ran out, and we kind of stopped collecting things. There was a fire in our apartment, so we moved with very little, and we don’t collect fabric as much as we used to.
“Unlike other brands, we don’t get custom materials made. We’re focused on finding close-out materials in the garment district, or maybe being inspired by something we come across and then finding some hand process we can apply to fabric to make it unique.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Everything you make seems personal, down to the hand-lettered show invitations, the book you made, screenprinted t-shirts for your pop-up events, and other ephemera. I’ve ordered things from your webshop and the packages always come covered with stickers and bound with these irregular strips of Mylar tape.
Sophie: “Yeah, I remember you got this dress… the blue shirt dress with the plaid skirt?”
Blackbird Spyplane: Yes, I love that one, and I have other pieces I’ve bought from different stores. One of my favorites of yours that I haven’t seen anyone else wear is a silver Tyvek tote I got at Bungee Space a couple years ago. It’s trimmed with this ribbon, but the ribbon’s been flipped, so you see the underside.
Sophie: “Oh yeah, that bag, we should add that to our list — we’re trying to pull designs from the vault to re-create as one-of-ones for the store.”
Blackbird Spyplane: What store? I know you’ve done pop-ups at your studio…
Claire: “We’re opening our first ‘flagship’ storefront downtown, in the Two Bridges / Chinatown area, in early December. It’ll be a place where people can see, touch, try on, and experience what we’re doing, and we love the idea of making something in the studio and having it directly fed into a place where people can see it a day later or the same day, even.”
Sophie: “We overproduce with our hands in the studio, so there’s a lot we want to share. And either Claire or I will be there working the shop in December, at least. It’ll be open weekends, and on whatever other days one of us can be there. ”
Blackbird Spyplane: When the Ssense bankruptcy news broke, our first thought was, what does this mean for small lines like yours? I didn’t see SC103 on the list that’s been circulating. Do they owe you a ton of money?
Claire: “We were luckily paid out ahead of the bankruptcy. So we aren’t owed anything, and we were able to get our future orders paid for as well.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Wow, amazing. I don’t think that’s the common experience.
Sophie: “Yeah, Ssense was one of our first stockists, and we had a great relationship with our buyer. But it’s incomprehensible what other lines are going through. We didn’t really know where we would stand in this, and we were making plans for the worst-case scenarios. The biggest impact for us is just not having their future orders.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Was that a large part of your business?
Claire: “Yeah, definitely. But we also just opened up some great new accounts with smaller stores across the U.S. Our smaller boutiques have been able to increase their budgets and sell our clothes at full price really quickly.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Smaller shops thriving and supporting small lines is what we love to hear. Okay, I asked you to send along some cherished possessions. Claire, let’s start with this fantastic drawing of your cat, Sid.
Claire: “When Sophie and I lived together, I got a cat and he kind of became SC103’s mascot. He lived in the studio for a year, now he lives at my place. I found this woman on eBay who does pet portraits, like, out in the middle of nowhere in England. I thought there was something so romantic about this woman receiving all these photographs of pets and then doing these extremely realistic drawings. She got Sid spot-on, to an eerie degree. And it was, like, $30. She’s really talented. I want to hire her for other things, like our brand portrait.”
Blackbird Spyplane: This is such a good tip, I put it in our new G.I.F.T.S. List.
Claire: “The other thing I chose is a garland of star anise. Years ago, I was experimenting with jewelry for a shoot, taking thread and stringing star anise together. We ended up making these long chains, just as these kind of sensitive, precious, organic things that were also sort of meaningless. And since then, this one glob of star anise on a thread has just been following us everywhere. Minutes before our last runway show, I was running around, so stressed, and one of our interns, Jules, came up to me, like, ‘This looks important. Do you need it?’
“It looked like a pile of trash, but I was, like, ‘Yes.’ It felt like this beautiful omen. I’m so happy she rescued it. Now it’s hanging in my truck. And it smells like licorice.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Sophie, what’s up with these these pressed flowers you chose?
Sophie: “So my dad’s a biologist, and these are plant samples he collected as an undergrad. It’s a connection to the organic that I feel like we’re missing by living in New York. And beyond that, my dad has always had this perspective of following what you love. He followed his love of studying frogs, and it opened up his entire world, including meeting my mom when he was doing field work in the jungle in Brazil. That’s what I’m always telling Claire — ‘We don’t know where this will end, but if we just follow what we love, something will come out of it.”
Blackbird Spyplane: And this cool old red photo of your mom — what’s the deal?
Sophie: “I don’t know why it’s red, but this is a picture from when she was about 6. It was taken in her hometown, Manaus, a tiny municipality on the Amazon. In Brazil, there are a lot of different occasions to dress up, and this was for the June festivals, called Festa Junina. Claire and I reflect a lot on ways that people communally celebrate, in the two different worlds we’re from. That was kind of how we oriented our show this September: All of these things just happen in places with no frills. Making it feel like an open-air thing, or, like, a rodeo parking lot.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Sometimes the best party is the one outside the party.
Sophie: “It’s true.”
SC103’s site is here. Their first store will open at 25 Henry Street in downtown Manhattan in early December; follow them on IG here for the exact date. Among the Spyfriends that carry their clothes are Stand Up Comedy, Vestige, Tangerine and Oroboro.
Our interviews with Adam Sandler, Kim Gordon, André 3000, Nathan Fielder, 100 gecs, Danielle Haim, Mac DeMarco, Jerry Seinfeld, Evan Kinori, David Grann, Matty Matheson, Emily Bode, Hua Hsu, Julia Heuer, Seth Rogen, Sandy Liang, Tyler, The Creator, Maya Hawke, King Krule, Steven Yeun, Daniel Arnold, John C. Reilly, Conner O’Malley, Clairo, Father John Misty & more are here.
I love this interview! Over the past month, I've rewatched the SC103 SS26 runway show on YouTube three times. Cannot stop thinking about those dresses, the rope-y shoes, and the crunch of gravel!