The tone, as always, is blunt, shameless, and provocative. King Matisse, aka Twink, got his start in 2021 as a stylist and production assistant for Azealia Banks, after all. The designer creates clothing that speaks playfully to his own community (see the Who Ate All the Pussy hat or the My Pronouns R God tee) without isolating the masses; his work has been featured in Vogue, the New York Times, Paper, and the Wall Street Journal, to name a few.

Twink is a lifestyle. He calls it “an attitude, not a physical thing” – one of carbonated atmospheres, glossy personalities, and maximum volume. This season’s collection steers into the high camp mentality with varied takes on the label’s go-to fabrications. Bodices, jockstraps and boleros are assembled from repurposed skins and scraps.

Thanks to his background in the fine arts, Twink approaches clothing as a malleable medium. His designs manage an impossible merge between sculpture and clubwear that feels equal parts readymade and ready-to-wear. Call it deconstructed eco grime, call it a dystopian dumpster dive. Though illegible at times, the looks tap into both synthetic and biological materials for a surprising, highly caffeinated take on upcycling. 

Dunkin’ Donuts to-go bags are reconfigured into paper mache miniskirts. Taxidermed pelts are arranged into foxy loincloths and gangly intimates. In the house of The Twink Next Door, an object lives not once but twice, though the new-not-new ethos is actually nothing new for the label; fast food and furs have reappeared as signature motifs for the last several seasons. A quartet of melted plastic gowns bring Twink’s experimental fabrications a new pulse, making FW26 the brand’s most technically ambitious showing yet.

“The inspiration is always iconic, always slay. I’m trying to bring some slay to some really depressing times.”  

It’s fun, it’s fierce, it’s lighthearted. But queerness at such high visibility also implicates an immediate and deeply serious politic. In the last year, Sydney Sweeney’s eugenics campaign for American Eagle and Conner Ives’ Protect the Dolls t-shirt have brought the fashion industry into non-fashion media discourse on both ends of the ideological spectrum. In such a charged political climate, it is critical as a designer - or really any creator with a platform - to vocalize an active stance against anti-queer and anti-trans movements.

Twink Next Door does so, and loudly. First of all, there’s only Gaga on the playlist, one of many signs that this is a canonically, unabashedly gay event. It’s feathered, plush, sparkled, tactile; this is touch me, look here, I bring the function so bump it! His mantra is “anyone can be twink,” and his world is an all-inclusive, all-you-can-serve buffet. Martinis are served backstage (extra dirty) and models throw donut holes into the audience.

There are also layers of social messaging embedded in Twink’s use of post-consumer goods. On a material level, bringing new life (and new value) to literal trash and carcasses is a way to give reverence to the discarded. Academics might call this a queering of use: to re-animate something sideways, or redirect an object’s orientation. Presenting taxidermy and fast food waste as high fashion is a violation of meaning that not only suggests beauty in the perverse, but resignifies deviant as desirable.

On a conceptual level, this maneuver amplifies expressions of identity often considered trashy or shunted to the sides: the camp, clubbed out, stripping, sexed. For a queer designer to clothe queer, trans, and BIPOC models in emblems of abjection and grotesquerie operates upon a logic of emphasis, irony, and redefinition. A critical reading of Twink’s work recognizes the hyperbole inherent here, in which the material reclamation of garbage gestures towards a social reclamation of the marginalized or fringed.

The collection’s attention to the animalesque is particularly indicative of this mechanism. Cheetah coats, cow print suiting, and horn like headpieces steer into the carnal and indulgent. Brash embodiment is posed not as immoral or vicious but instead something glorified, striking, and enfleshed.

While the semantic mechanisms at play in the collection carry a great deal of gravity, they also deliver on visual weight and untamed glam. If one thing is to be taken from the runway this evening, it is the irrepressible presence of community in the face of interference. The people have spoken:

America runs on Twink.