This Week #23 | New Yorkness
An inside look at Small Talk Studio's SS25, with Nick Williams & Phil Ayers
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Dōgen, the 13th century Buddhist and founder of the Sōtō school of Zen, introduced the notion of “Shoshaku jushaku,” which roughly translates into English as “to succeed wrong with wrong.” His point was that in Zen there’s no right or wrong, in the ordinary sense, and Enlightenment is not seen as achieving some sort of permanent state of goodness. Instead, one continuous, life-long mistake can also be Zen. To paraphrase Shunryū Suzuki, someone who thinks he’s a good person is not a good person. And someone who thinks he’s a terrible person may actually be a good one if he’s always trying to be a good person with a single-minded effort.
It’s possible for a person, an object, or a place to “have a moment.” The same holds for brands, styles and trends in fashion. Bode had a moment. Made in Austria is having one. Belgium surely had a moment from the 1980s onwards, with the Antwerp Six, and is already having another, with Julian Klausner at Dries Van Noten, Anthony Vaccarello at Saint Laurent and Julie Kegels bursting upon the scene. But is it possible for someone or something to always be having a moment?
If you’re thinking straight, the answer will of course be “no.” If you’re following Zen’s non-classical logic and willing to accept contradictions at the heart of reality, the answer will have to be “yeah, sure.”
There’s something to New York that demands a sense of Zen, then. The city’s pronounced dead every once in a while, only to come back to live again, like some kind of continuous resurrection. Back in 2024 GQ gave up on New York Fashion Week and praised it in the same breath. The city’s fashion industry is in dangerous decline and, according to some, it’s no longer a fashion capital. Yet, under the radar, it’s also home to the future of American menswear. Perhaps that’s not a future of “very many important, global luxury success stories,” or even of a single successor to Thom Browne. It’s a future nonetheless. One that’s global but not about being global. One that’s luxurious but not about being luxurious. One whose success is not, and will never be, about success. This is a future of thisness, rather than newness. A future of creating maximum presence in the present, rather than capitalizing on the absent-minded spectacle of what’s to come.
It’s always a good time to resist the existence, or at least question the normality, of multi-billion dollar companies and industries. But if there ever was a best time to do it, let it be now. Yes, it’s stunning that Lemaire has built a “Parisian luxury empire,” that A$AP Rocky is now Creative Director at Ray-Ban, that BoF uses an AI tool to find out that DSquared2 and Moschino “led the conversation” at Milan Fashion Week, and that LVMH Luxury Ventures owns majority stakes in Our Legacy and Kapital. Yet, none of all this — celebrities, gimmicks, excessive wealth, marketing tactics, investment capital — cares about you. So why should you care? Don’t do it. Instead, care about that which cares for you. When you do, you’re also caring for yourself. That’s non-duality right there.
This is what’s behind my own loss of interest in a brand as soon as it’s hitting the runway. I get the appeal. It can see the amounts of creativity and craftsmanship. I can understand the buzz, the excitement, and even the power of success. But I don’t feel it. No, I have to be more precise: I do feel it, but the feeling it gives me is not a feeling that makes me feel alive, that empowers my being, that intensifies my existence — or whatever you call it. I cannot care for it, because what it wants to me to feel is making it impossible for me to care for myself. And that, I guess, no, I know, is also what’s behind my interest in independent brands.
Let’s turn this into a broader point: I believe this feeling is what’s behind their relevance. This is their relevance. They’re the stuff that reality is made of. “Reality isn’t a dirty word,” said Christophe Lemaire. And he’s right. It’s exactly what ties Lemaire, The Row and Auralee to the hundreds and hundreds of small brands, one-man or one-woman labels, and self-sacrificing makers across the globe. It’s doing groceries. It’s falling in love. It’s all that matters to you on a gut level between the moment you’re born and the moment you die. Of course, reality will be turned into a concept before we know it. In fact, it’s probably happening as we speak. And that’s okay. Let it have its moment. We know that there are brands out there who’ll always be real. Who cannot be unreal. Whose reality will forever “have a moment.”
One of them is Small Talk Studio, a young clothing label based out of New York City rapidly making a name for themselves through their hand-drawn and embroidered garments. They’re part of a new wave of independent brands popping in and out of existence in the city’s Garment District and, a little further out, in Brooklyn, Queens or New Jersey. I sat down with Small Talk’s founders Nick Williams and Phil Ayes to talk about the brand’s Spring/Summer 2025 collection, to be released this week. Along the way, we touched upon a host of other topics, including the undeniable sense of New Yorkness running through everything they do.
Lukas Mauve (LM): For those not in the know — including myself — could you give a sketch of Small Talk Studio’s biography?
Nick Williams (NW): Yes, of course. We’re a seasonal clothing brand initially known for our elaborate custom hand-drawn garments. We now balance our output between made-to-order custom garments, seasonal collections, and special projects.
Our garments are created with a sense of elevated play and artistry, but designed with everyday wear in mind. We’re sourcing a mix of domestic and Japanese deadstock fabrics as well as creating custom milled and printed fabrics and manufacturing almost everything in New York. Like the custom garments the brand was founded upon, our collections are executed with a high degree of craftsmanship and attention to detail. Our practice revolves around research and experimentation, sourcing imagery and inspiration from a broad and disparate range of sources and working to create new contexts for our garments and the visual worlds behind them.
LM: Could you tell me a bit more about how Small Talk Studio started?
NW: It started as a side project of mine back in 2018 after my grandma taught me hand embroidery. I was doing hand embroidered garments for friends and friends of friends for a while and it eventually turned into doing drawings all over garments, around the same time that Bode’s “Senior Cord” was starting to blow up. So there was some overlapping press, and around Spring 2020, there was enough demand to quit my job and start fulfilling these custom orders full time. Phil was working at Pilgrim Surf & Supply here in Brooklyn and maintaining his own art and illustration practice, and we were living together. When the overwhelming demand was sustained for about 6-8 months, I asked him if he wanted to come on board and help do this full time at the beginning of 2021, and we’ve been partnering on the brand ever since.
We were working on a lot of vintage and workwear, and our first foray into cut and sew was using some of our favorite silhouettes as reference and developing base garments for the custom pieces we were making. From there we decided to slowly start developing a collection and broaden the operation so that we didn’t get stuck doing just one thing, which admittedly we were aware could fizzle out any time. We had been getting inquiries from stores here and in Japan for wholesale buys, and it didn’t make sense to wholesale the custom garments because at the time we had an endless queue of individual customers ready to pay full retail price. So Fall/Winter 2023 was the first seasonal collection, and we presented it during market week here in New York in January 2023, and then we started working with a sales agency out of London (DMSR) to present the next collection in Paris that summer.
LM: Ben from &son recently told me that Small Talk Studio is “amassing a cult following in NYC.” Could you give me a sense of what’s behind your momentum?
NW: That is very kind of Ben to say, and honestly I think the biggest thing behind that momentum is that we have a really strong set of stores here, who each do a distinctly good job of telling our story in a compelling way to people who are living and shopping here: Ben from &son, Tal and Eldar from Colbo, Naoki from Blue in Green, Justin from Cueva — every one of them make a point of understanding what it is we’re into and focusing on in any given season and passing that on to their customers. They’re also our friends. We are in their shops regularly too and seeing each other out and about, so it makes the translation of our vision that much easier.
I think it helps in general that we both (Phil and I) love this city so much and being out seeing and meeting new people and trying to share what we are working on as widely as we can. We’re soon going to try out taking regular shopping appointments at the studio as well to try and share that part of our world a bit more and present the clothes right at home in the context they were made in. I think we’ve seen that everything we make does best when it can be seen and felt and tried on in person and that is especially true here in New York, so it seems like a no-brainer.
LM: From what you say, I get the impression that Small Talk has New York written all over it — from its vision to its customers and stockists. There’s something like Americana in menswear — we’ll have to talk about that in more detail soon — but would you say there’s also something a “New York” moment happening? From my outsider’s perspective, I’m seeing a boom of new New York-based brands doing things in their own, place-based way.
NW: I think that’s true in the sense you’re talking about (customer base/brand awareness, outward facing vision of the brand, etc.), and I also agree that there is a moment happening here for designers. It’s another thing I could go way into, but the short answer is that there is a critical mass of small independent designers here who have distinct visions but shared resources. For a lot of those designers, those resources tend to be in the Garment District. There is still an ecosystem of producers here who make it possible to develop a clothing line, and on the other side of it, there is a relatively new network of really good stores who give these clothes a home. I think most of us also have some level of global distribution for what we’re making, even if it’s small in scale. I believe with Small Talk we’re right in the middle of the landcape of emerging designers in New York, both in terms of scale and trajectory, and also there is plenty social overlap between a lot of us.
LM: Are you eager to expand Small Talk far beyond New York or would you, in a sense, already be entirely satisfied for the brand to exist and take shape within the city?
NW: Right now, we mainly exist here, in Japan and Korea, and on a couple of the larger online retailers (Ssense and Mr. Porter). We are happy for that to expand, but I think our main focus right now is to gain a bit of autonomy and flexibility by growing our own customer base.
I think I can speak for both of us in saying that one reason we love living and working in new York is that all of this is possible at such a high level here in one place (the manufacturing, the development, all of the creative elements that go into brand presentation, and the sales). As a result, we get to see it go from an idea or sketch to being part of someone’s outfit out in the city and have fun with every step in between. And everything feels more feasible and real when you’ve got talented people around you who are also excited to help bring something to life. Beyond that, it’s there there is true spontaneity here, people take dressing seriously and have fun with it, and New York is a distinctly American city that also rises above so many of the worst parts of living in this country.
LM: And what’s the particular story behind your upcoming SS25 collection?
NW: This collection in some ways leans a little more toward sport, but achieving some of the more technical aspects by using craft techniques (crochet venting in some shorts, pants, and shirting, “hidden” applique letters on a dress shirt, mesh stripe knit polos, etc.). There are a lot of good year-round silhouettes with some built in venting to feel some wind on skin. As always, nearly everything is constructed in natural fibers, and in this case with an emphasis on breathability and comfort in warmer temperatures: t-shirts constructed in a dryer blend of organic cotton and tencel, knits in a cool feeling cotton/wool blend, suiting in a sumi-dyed cotton/linen blend, and a dry cotton broadcloth across a range of shorts and shirting styles. It’s also the first time we’ve introduced tailoring, and we are really proud of how the suit came out.
When we were sourcing imagery and putting together some visual inspiration for this collection, I was saving a lot of images from old car magazines and ads and these really wild illustrations from old trucker radio calling cards (QSL cards) that we use a lot and also these really bizarre images of old stuffed animals and children’s toys from catalogues. We also had the pleasure of working with our friend Sammie Purulak to take images from his book Silver Dreaming, a collection of scanned imagery from his dad’s collection of old auto magazines, and use it to make a printed denim and printed cotton mesh fabric that we used for a few pieces in the collection.
All in all, it felt like we landed sort of unintentionally on this hard/soft dichotomy in the little slice of Americana we were culling together: car culture being hard edged and sometimes comically masculine and all these kind of psychedelic catalog images of stuffed animals and other toys being soft and plush, with some of the trucker illustrations straddling the line between the two poles. I think that beyond serving as visual inspiration, this hard/soft dichotomy also carried over a bit into fabric selection and garment construction.
All in all, SS25 feels like we got to hone in one what the essence of Small Talk is: carefully selected fine fabrics, simple and versatile silhouettes, a sense of play that ranges from subtle (vented stripes on the knit polos) to loud (printed stuffed animals drawing on the dress shirt). I think we also try to use an outsider or untrained perspective to our advantage, opening up room for the unexpected, whether that’s in embellishments, fabric combinations, color palette, or any number of other things. Both Phil and I come from more of an art background and are not formally trained in garment design, but have learned a tremendous amount through working with a range of longtime vendors in the Garment District.
LM: I really like the SS25 visuals. For someone unfamiliar with Small Talk Studio — in terms of wearing, feeling, experiencing the garments — they give a strong sense of its identity. I’m wondering how you look at this. Do you feel that the visuals and looks reflect Small Talk Studio’s singular vision?
NW: That’s really good to hear! We are really lucky to have a lot of friends here who are incredible image makers, graphic designers, stylists, models, etc., and I think it’s taken us a few seasons to figure out exactly how to fully lean into that New York network and make it for us. There are too many people to shout out for helping make our vision come to life. This season we worked with our friends Erin Kelly Meuchner and Chris Calderon to produce our campaign shoot (images on the bus, in the cafe, and on the soccer field), and our friends Juan Heredia and Jake Booth modeled for that shoot (along with Erin too). We shot pretty much everything in the neighborhood most of us live in. Our friend Jake Wayler does all of our product photography, and we tried to push it into a kind or refined and slightly more experimental territory this time around, which I’m really happy with. And there are many others we love collaborating with regularly. I really do think that working with friends has a lot of power for creating a tangible and natural sensibility.
In terms of reflecting a vision, I think the biggest part of the brand ethos that we try to replicate in the visuals is an elevated sense of play. We make these clothes to be worn out in the world and especially here in New York, so we want to make images that are a pretty direct translation of that and add a little attitude and aspiration on top.
LM: You’ve mentioned “play” and “playfulness” a couple of times. Is this purely an expression of your own personal perspectives or also, in one way or another, a critical note on the otherwise rather serious world of fashion?
NW: I think bot of us wear a mix of a lot of Small Talk, some pieces from friends’ brands and plenty of vintage, and I would say neither of us take it too seriously but have a lot of fun getting dressed. We live in a city that rewards it, and I love observing other people’s style — both people who are obviously in it and know what they’re doing and people who just have a natural sense of style and play with their outfits.
With Small Talk, the playfulness and maintaining graphic and hand drawn elements as well as leaning into a lot of other artisan embellishment methods (embroidery, applique, crochet venting, beading, etc.) has been a way to create some continuity from the origins of the operation into what we do now, and also just a natural extension of both of our backgrounds being in art more than in fashion. It’s not necessarily an intentional critique of the serious and austere side of men’s fashion, but maybe partially a response to the saturation of more serious and minimal menswear. It obviously helps to have something distinct about what you’re making, even if it’s not necessarily exactly what is on trend at the moment…but whether that even exists in a definitive sense is a whole other conversation! I think we strike a pretty good balance between more overtly embellished and graphic pieces and more subtly adorned pieces. I feel we’re seeing a pretty broad range in our customer base as a result.
LM: Could you talk me through three of my favorites from SS25: your knit polo, raw silk twill zip front jacket, and the look made up of your sumi-dyed canvas blazer, pink dobby stripe dress shirt, and the crochet vent jeans.
NW: Yes, great choices!
The first is a style we tried out in SS24, but the silhouette and knit quality still needed a little bit of work. This time we’ve perfected the silhouette (it really has fit so many people who have tried it on quite well). It is made from a merino wool and cotton yarn blend, so even though it’s fairly heavy weight, it is breathable and cool on the body. We definitely emphasized that quality by doing the stripes in an open mesh knit so you truly can feel some wind on your skin. I honestly think it’s worn best with nothing underneath. It feels really good and I think it looks better too. It’s a slouchy silhouette but it reads sharp when worn — dropped shoulder, roomy body, cropped with a rolled hem, but elegantly articulated collar and sleeve, and nice weight.
The next one comes in a fabric we used for a dress shirt and double pleat trouser last season, and it’s one of my favorite fabrics we’ve ever come across. It’s from a mill in Japan, and it has the perfect high-low mix of elegant drape with a sort of intentionally pilly/slubby texture, as well as the durable twill weave of a workwear fabric. In both cases, we overdyed it, which further breaks and softens the fabric and gives it a more velvety texture. The drape actually felt a little too pronounced for this jacket, so we fused the entire body with a lightweight woven fusible to give it a little more structure. It has a bemberg lining, like a suit, so it goes on very smoothly. Since it’s Spring, we wanted both jackets to feel like a really nice overshirt, and I think that’s exactly what this jacket is like. Like the knit polo, the collar, shoulder and sleeve are really nicely articulated and it feels somewhat tailored even though it’s fairly roomy fit. It has a two-way RiRi zipper and topstitched western style curved double welt pockets.
The blazer here is one of things I’m most proud of in this collection. It is our first time introducing tailoring, and I wanted to do something that felt refined but also very relaxed and wearable in an everyday context. We combined elements from this kind of oversized double breasted linen kimono blazer and a tuxedo jacket from the 80s. It's made in a fairly open weave canvas that has been dyed with sumi ink, so it has an uneven streaky dye pattern, and it's lined in the same bemberg fabric as the zip jacket. I have been wearing the full suit around a lot the last few months, and I truly have no notes for the finished product, which is rare! It feels amazing, and it has been a real gateway to casual everyday suiting for me.
The shirt Erin is wearing in this photo is a super lightweight cotton dobby with a natural kind of puckering to it. It feels gauzy and airy and light on the body when worn. I personally don't love short sleeve button downs (speaking only for myself here!), so this season, I tried to design only long sleeve dress shirts, making sure that pretty much all of them could be worn comfortably in the heat of summer.
The last element here is the crochet vent jean. We've experimented with this crochet venting technique a few other times before, but we didn't fully dial it in until this season, and now we've included it across three different styles: drawstring shorts, curve hem dress shirt, and our straight leg jeans. These are made in a 9oz cotton herringbone fabric that is fairly structured and we added the vents across the front right around where a double knee panel might go. They have kind of the opposite effect of a double knee, adding a little more flexibility around the knee and a delicate kind of open lace where the flat felled seam and rivets might usually go. The vendor we work with here to add the vents had to reboot a very old machine they hadn't used in a couple decades to make these for us, and we were glad to see it worked brilliantly because this will be a signature detail going forward.
Small Talk Studio will launch their S25 collection, with a few exclusive styles, on their website this Friday, 14 March. Outside New York/VS, the collection will be stocked at the following stores: Dover Street Market, Ssense, Mr. Porter, Super A Market (Japan), Isetan (Japan), Journal Standard (Japan), Hollywood Ranch Market (Japan), Domicile (Japan), Addicted (Korea), Adekuver (Korea) and Peak (Russia).