“Actual Old-School Glamor”: Inside Gauntlett Cheng’s 10-Year Anniversary Show

FRIDAY 9:18 PM SEPTEMBER 6, 2024 WILLIAMSBURG

On Friday night, the designer duo Esther Gauntlett and Jenny Cheng returned to New York Fashion Week to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of their cherished downtown brand Gauntlett Cheng, an occasion that brought a ballroom filled with friends, collaborators, and fans to tears. Soundtracked by Esra Soraya Padgett, performing under the moniker Chicklette, their SS25 runway show, “Dream Baby Dream,” conjured the image of a girl returning home from the best party of her life, with models trailing the ballroom in Williamsburg in delicate evening dresses and metallic knits dripping with sequins and rhinestones. Moments after the show, Gauntlett and Cheng sat down with Padgett to reflect on their label’s decennial. 

———

ESRA SORAYA PADGETT: You guys just finished your 10-year anniversary show. How do you feel?

JENNY CHENG: Jello.

ESTHER GAUNTLETT: Yeah, I don’t know. Jenny said to me earlier, throughout us working together this season, she’s like, “You have a shell. You don’t crack. You don’t crack at all. Nothing gets to you.” And this just fucking got me. I feel insane, but I feel so insanely grateful for everyone that helped.

CHENG: It’s such a beautiful team. Everyone we’re working with, it’s like a family. We’ve worked with people like you for so many years… and everyone helping in the studio, it’s beautiful.

PADGETT: Everyone was so emotional.

GAUNTLETT: Everyone was crying.

CHENG: Yeah, it didn’t help me hold it together.

GAUNTLETT: When you started singing, it was like, me and Jenny looked at each other and I broke. And then, Dylan Chavles, our hairstylist, looked at both of us and just melted as well. When you picked that song [“Hit the Ground Running” by Smog] as well…

PADGETT:  Yeah. This year I worked on the music with a friend, Jack Callahan, and when you asked me to sing live we were looking for a cover, almost right away we both thought that song just captured the spirit of this collection. 

GAUNTLETT: It was so us, and so very much the vibe of someone that’s trying to do something with just every little scrap of anything they have available to them.

CHENG: And there’s so many unknowns, but all you know is that you’re going to “hit the ground running.” And that’s enough.

PADGETT: The theme of this season was Dream Baby Dream. So, what is the dream?

GAUNTLETT: I mean, this is the dream. When we started this season, I was listening to the song “Dream Baby Dream” [by Suicide], walking home from the studio, and I was sending Jenny screenshots of it. It’s like “Fuck, we work so hard. We try so hard.” We have this insane determination to keep going, to push ourselves, to make each thing better. At no point during this was there a moment where we’re like, “We can’t do it. It’s too much. We’re going to say no. We’re going to scale back.” If you had told me 10 years ago this is what it would be, I would be so insanely grateful. It’s nice as a moment of reflection on it. It’s not a dream for the future, it’s this right now–what we have. And it feels good and it feels comfy and it feels like I belong. And it feels like us–completely.

CHENG: There’s a lot of love in the studio and with everyone we work with.

PADGETT: What’s changed in 10 years?

GAUNTLETT: I mean, so much. When we started the label, it was us with David [Moses] and we worked with him this season again. We made the finale dress together, which was out of old trims we’d collected from the Harlem Dance Theater Archives.

CHENG: Yeah, literally ten years ago with David, we went to their warehouse in New Jersey and got all these trims and fabrics and we’ve been using them throughout the years.

GAUNTLETT: We’ve used them in everything. So this season, we’re going through this box and we’re like, “Oh, that’s the pearls from SS15, and that’s the sequins we made into necklaces in AW17…” It’s just like this magic studio box that we’ve been pulling from, and this season, we just put all of it on a dress.

CHENG: And all of our friends worked on it.

GAUNTLETT: Everyone that came in touched it. It was that thing that was in the studio draped and anyone that came in, we were like, “Oh, you need a job?” And they sat and they put things on it. My dad spent all of yesterday applying sequins and gems and feathers.

PADGETT: Wow. And David Moses came back this season to design some pieces?

GAUNTLETT: It was that dress. It was that dress and then the fabric for some of the other pieces, which was like a skirt…

CHENG: A belt…

GAUNTLETT: Yeah, we were thinking about what we wanted to make together, because it felt really important to work with him again as a kind of way to—

CHENG: Honor the way we started.

GAUNTLETT: Yeah, and come back to it with great intentions and great vibes. And when we thought about it, there was this dress we made years ago for an exhibition that Matthew Linde did where we wrote our entire group chat out over this massive big dress. It’s not necessarily the same design, but it’s like the three of us sitting down and making something together, playing. So much of this season is just playing. 

PADGETT: There’s also this other dreamy quality of it too, which is that it feels very girly in a sense, the flowy dresses  and a little princess-y and you know, we’re in the ballroom…

GAUNTLETT: Yeah.

PADGETT: I mean it all in a good way. You have such an elegant style, but I think it’s cool that it’s remained kind of feminine and young and playful.

GAUNTLETT: In a weird way, it’s like we’re doing evening wear, but from the perspective of girls that wear bike shorts.

PADGETT: I’ve always thought of Gauntlett Cheng as making clothes for people that are really sexy, but not in a thotty way—actual, old-school glamor.

GAUNTLETT: I think the way we’ve approached designing is so body-centric and we’re always playing with texture and with textiles and everything. We’re never really experimenting with form—it’s not big and voluminous. We want things that  grab and involve the body. 

CHENG: Yeah.

GAUNTLETT: It’s about fabric on skin.  I mean, what I love the most about it is putting these amazing, incredible fabrics on our friends. One of my favorite things is all of our friends, when they’re like, “I have to go to a wedding. I have to go to a gala or a birthday party.” And everyone just borrows a dress—it’s like this communal closet in a way, it’s so nice. The clothes just make sense for that. These gorgeous evening wear, bias-cut, crazy glam dresses, and you put them on us, or you, and they make sense.

PADGETT: So the “dream” in question is about you and it’s a reflection of the 10-year anniversary and how you have changed over the years and grown into yourselves. But do you feel like the industry has changed? Are you watching things change around you at the same time?

GAUNTLETT: Yeah. You know, we met working at Eckhaus Latta and our first show was with Vaquera. There is this community that’s really developed.

CHENG: The people that are helping us this season, now they’re starting brands.

GAUNTLETT: Yeah, it’s like a next generation sort of thing. I think we’ve all grown up in very different ways. If you think of brands like Vaquera showing in Paris and Eckhaus Latta, massive and amazing. I think one thing that always felt important to me, and I think to Jenny as well, is to love what we’re doing. And we’ve taken a lot of steps in this label to ensure that we keep loving it, including not getting on this insane fashion schedule, minimizing the collections, making sure we have time to develop things, really getting a chance to play and pushing back a little bit against the industry. 

CHENG: Doing things our own way.

PADGETT: Do you think the demands are the same? I mean, you’re saying you’re more comfortable doing it your own way than you were 10 years ago.

GAUNTLETT: I think it took us a long time to figure out that we could do it our own way and that we could still be successful and that success looks different for everyone. Success for me is very tied into personal happiness and being able to be really, really proud of what I’m putting out there and enjoying it along the way. I mean, there’s been crazy moments, but I loved this season in the studio. We had so much fun. And I mean, the clothes were crazy, but we had so much fun making them as well.

CHENG: It’s about what we all make together.

GAUNTLETT: Yeah.

PADGETT: Whenever you do a show, everyone’s really psyched about it. Even in the audience, the feeling is like everyone’s been waiting for this. And doing the music for you guys, what’s special is that you always have a story. It’s not super concrete, but it was like: this is the idea, “Dream Baby Dream.”

GAUNTLETT: I feel like we often don’t know until almost at the end of designing what the actual vibe is. Our last show, we were like, “Oh, it’s kind of a little moody and it’s a little dark and it’s a little sad.” And this year, I feel like we knew a lot earlier and we were like, “It’s a celebration.” But at the same time, I kept thinking so much of it looks like the studio floor. It’s sequins and rhinestones and a lurex sparkle thread in everything. It’s the stuff you peel off your shoe at the end of work because you’ve been walking around in it. It’s the random assembled collection of stuff that’s stuck to your clothes.

PADGETT: I really liked the image of this collection as: “you just got home from the best party ever.”

GAUNTLETT: Yeah, that’s a really good way of putting it. And the show was the party.

CHENG: An emotional party.

PADGETT: Now what are you going to do?

CHENG: Sleep.

GAUNTLETT: Eat.

CHENG: Eat, sleep, rave, repeat.