On Monday, Gupta was greeted by friends and collaborators old and new: He and Deborah Willis, NYU’s photography department chair, met in 1989, and he and Helena Tejedor, the stylist for the campaign, met last week. The singer Brent Faiyaz, a frequent Fashion Week sight and one of the opening voices at last season’s Pyer Moss show, was also in attendance. He released his new EP Fuck the World last week, and was taking in the scenes around town before heading out to tour behind it: “The Brandon Maxwell show, that shit was fire. Claudia Li was fire, Sies Marjan, that shit was fucking crazy.”
This is Helmut Lang’s first ready-to-wear collection under the creative direction of Thomas Cawson, who came across Christopher Street, 1976 last summer. He and Gupta quickly followed one another on Instagram. “There was just this really intimate way of looking at queer culture in New York,” Cawson said on Monday. “Sunil was really keen to come back to New York and come back to Christopher Street and try and recreate the feeling of the photos on a broader cast of characters.”
“To even talk about the idea of nostalgia within Helmut Lang is already strange,” Cawson said, citing the brand’s reputation for modern-looking severity. He thought the vitality and joy of Gupta’s 1976 photos would complement the designs, and also on display on Monday was a coat based on an archival design, but in a warm brown instead of its original, sleek dove gray.
When Gupta took those first photos, he was working by himself, and even as his career has developed, he said he’s used to working with smaller teams than those that typically assemble fashion campaigns. But the fit was natural: “When I was preparing for it, I was wondering, do I study fashion?” Gupta said. “I decided not to. I just went back and looked at documentary pictures, because that’s what I do and that’s what I felt they wanted me to do.”
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