WE CRIED AT THE CLUB
WITH CADENA Y ROSAS
Chainmail designer Carolina Guerrero just hosted Coil, the first solo presentation of her label Cadena y Rosas. Brought to life by thirteen of New York’s best in burlesque, movement and erotic performance, the event merged fashion and bodily theater for the hottest evening of the season.
It’s like if the afters was also the show. Rosewood Theater is a cabaret club, it’s a Saturday night, cocktails are flowing and overflowing onto plush velvet sofas and beaded curtain walls. The venue remains open to regular clientele.1 There is no barrier between the fashion crowd and the general populace2 – none of the exclusivity that bars access to most industry events – so the vein of glamor that accompanies The Fashion ShowTM is grounded into the real, the gritty, the true.
It is a stroke of small genius: to present clothing in the actual atmosphere where it is worn. Aware that her work fills a particular niche, that chainmail is site-specific, Guerrero places her craft into social context. Gathering the people who wear it into a vital and celebratory space. Assembling not just an audience but a community, both around chainmail and the values it caters to. Pleasure, agency, expression unfiltered.
Turns out Rosewood is also the spot where Sean Baker filmed the club scenes in Anora. Despite (or maybe thanks to) its polarizing reception, the movie made large strides in bringing the subjectivities and realities of sex work into mainstream discourse. To host Coil at such a pivotal location feels not only to carry on the conversation, but to situate erotic performance into a concrete history. Because this show isn’t fiction. It’s real life, real labor, real people working in the industry who have arrived here with all different reasons for doing so.
Guerrero emphasizes that the show is not about the clothes as much as who is wearing them. She felt an urgency to host the night as an offering for the dancers and artists in b@nned communities. “I’m talking about the clubs, I’m talking about the sex workers, I’m talking about the performers. When I wanted to do a show, it was very obvious that it was not gonna be about me. At the end of the day I’m just dressing them, you know?”
And dress them she did. The looks are decadent, intricate, clinging and close.3 Chainmail corsetry, chainmail nipple covers. Harnesses, thongs, skirts and bodices - silvered, flickering designs activated through their contact with skin. Backstage in the greenroom, the performers describe the feeling of wearing the metal, how the material warms gradually to their touch as if molting, melding, marrying the body with its ornament and merging into some gilded armor.
The garments hold the body in strict tension, a tension released through removal and reveal, stripping and strobing. Flesh forged and discarded. It should be backwards, a fashion show that communicates clothing’s desirability through the act of taking it off. But for Cadena y Rosas, the clothing is secondary to its subject: the eternity of the human form. The divine erotic.
Over the course of the hour we are met with all of its iterations. Some slow and seductive, others pulsing and percussive. La Máquina plays into coqueterie with a coy feather fan routine. Things get hot and heavy during Mia V and William TieMeTighter’s live shibari act. Sigourney Norman nears sirenhood on the pole. Each performer speaks sensuality in their own language.
And each performer is undeniably in their bag. The legendary Lou Lou D’vil opens the show at the top of her game, pouring candlewax onto her face, prowling across the stage with a shining stare and a smoldering striptease. A chrome-coated Toni Walker swings from suspended chains so gracefully I’m convinced I need to sign up for silks class. Then Nisha Virmani gives us a corporate-camp rendition of Marie Davidson’s Work that we didn’t know we needed, acting out the good-girl-gone-bad-ification of an office siren turned rogue.
It’s playful and spunky, but Virmani’s performance brings up topical themes about labor and resistance. We live in a capitalist system that asks us daily to suppress our desires, our curiosity, and our sense of play. To find presence - much less pleasure - in the body has become a disruptive act. Coil jolts us back into ourselves. Reminds us that it is an emancipatory act to assert authority over our own physicality. To re-occupy our bodies. Though dance. Through sex. Through adornment. How we chose to express, exhibit, perform our own flesh.
For the closing performance, Yakikat enacts a tender choreography that unironically has us crying in the club. She is covered in liquid latex and loose metallic links, gradually stripping off the layers as if peeling off skin. It’s a different kind of tension and release, channeling the claustrophobia of our conditions and the ecstasy of liberation. The vulnerability it takes to go bare, to acknowledge the naked and searing truths embedded into womanhood and actively distort their positioning. Before the show Yakikat speaks on the necessity to reclaim embodiment from societal policing and demand.
“I think about the importance to recognize that we all have our own bodies and that we shouldn’t neglect them. Especially when people get caught up in work and hustle culture, we just neglect ourselves, which ends up making us weaker to fight against the system whenever it’s time to. The erotic reniassance is getting back into your body, whether that means voyeurism or actually being the subject.”
Chainmail requires endurance. There is no machinery to expedite the production process. It is a craft that necessitates human touch, each loop closed by hand, one ring at a time. Making one swatch takes hours. Making a full garment takes days. Guerrero’s team describes the process as intimate, meditative, and certainly not for the weak-wristed. An act of genuine artisanship and deep care that captures the principles of slow fashion at its most literal - its fabrication demands patience and its desirability has proven immune to the fluctuations of trend. 4
Untethered from the feverish pace and commercial intent of NYFW, Cadena y Rosas sets a new precedent for the fashion show. No more stoic nonchalance, no more muted irony. Coil is a return to reverence and a resurrection of theatricality. Earnest, uplifting, a raw and evocative reminder that it can - that it’s supposed to - feel good.
FOOTNOTES
- So yes, there’s the usual shades of throaty catcalling but there’s also yells of ETHEREAL! STUN! GET IT GIRL! It’s basically the Instagram comments section of a beautiful woman’s selfie but vocalized IRL.
- Excluding, of course, the aesthetic barrier. Style is a dead giveaway separating the polo-shirted club regulars from the fabulously corseted NYFW guests.
- A moment to mention the hair Marin
- Wearing chainmail dates back three thousand years so we can safely assume it’s not falling out of fashion anytime soon.
CREDITS
PHOTO & VIDEO Kaden Bard Dawson
WORDS Lily Moskowitz
ORGANIZER Carolina Guerrero
DESIGNER/CREATIVE DIRECTOR Cadena y Rosas
HAIR LEAD Marin
HAIR TEAM Courtney Peak Leum Lee
MAKEUP Sophie Hartnett
SPACE Rosewood Theater
PERFORMERS
LOU LOU D’VIL @loulou_dvil
KENNADY SCHNEIDER NOEL @kennschneider
GLYPH @glamour.spells
LA MÁQUINA @lamaqu1na
TONI WALKER @floatingthroughspaces
YAKIKAT @yaki.kat
MALIA SINE @maliasine
CAT DE LA LUNE @catdelalune
MIA V @miav.me
WILLIAM TIEME TIGHTLY @tiemetigher
MELINDA MAY @melindamayyy
SIGOURNEY NORMAN @__lawyerbae
NISHA VIRMANI @nishavirmani