3 September 2025 |
Anja Cecilia’s Dollar Store Couture is a name to watch.
On a sweltering July night, a local Brooklyn dollar store is packed full of some of the most expressive maximalist fashion kids in the entire city, courtesy of designer Anja Cecilia’s debut runway show. Discount stickers are taped into visible G-strings, colorful plastic tote bags are refashioned into glorious halters and logo tops, and baseball caps are quilted into swingy maxi skirts. The shop owner is perched at the checkout desk, proudly watching, as standing fans oscillate and blow through the skinny scarves, mini skirts and ruffles of the standing room only crowd. Welcome to Anja Cecilia’s weird, wild fashion world, where anything goes and the cute kitsch of the dollar store is the pinnacle of style inspiration.
Cecilia is the self-taught designer who shook up this season’s fashion month before it even began. She moved from Seattle to New York at 18 and founded her namesake line in 2022. She didn’t go to fashion school and was trained to sew by her grandmother. Her first show is the result of the work she’s been doing for her namesake fashion line, in collaboration with her digital archive and viral Instagram account @dollar_store_couture, where she documents her favorite dollar store finds. Think: bold, in-your-face pieces, all upcycled, hand-sewn and styled from local dollar store objects.
The founder of Dollar Store Couture, Anja Cecilia.
“I was just shopping at the dollar store a lot,” she says. “Kind of out of a necessity and then I started to find really weird things in these stores, like a lot of old stock and off-brand. After realizing how much off-kilter stuff existed in these stores, it was a whole untapped world. I mean, obviously you kind of create in the conditions that you live in, so it just inevitably started leaking into what I was making until I realized that the collection was turning into Dollar Store Couture.”
Inspired by upbringing, doing theater and watching her favorite TV show Shake it Up on Disney, Cecilia’s aesthetic is a mix of fun, poppy, cute, and ironic that pulls from all corners of early internet subcultures. A model wearing a corset and shower curtain closed the show. Elsewhere, t-shirts came printed with “going out of business forever” and “we tried & we failed”. Polka dot maxi skirts mixed with a puffy jacket covered in retro yellow cabs while compacts were strung together to create a chainmail effect top styled with low-cut jeans and a skateboard. Plastic “thank you” bags became handbags. Skittles and Red Bull were tucked into the top of a blouse. Toy guitars were carried over the shoulders of maximalist overloaded hoodies. Measuring tapes were turned into fringed fabric and sticker sheets became mini dresses.
Cecilia sees the dollar store as a source of untapped potential. “There is definitely something to be said about the overall curation of it,” she says. “One of my favorite things is the fact that somebody actually picked out everything, it’s not a thrift shop. Things don’t just end up there. They were chosen. I like being able to see the person behind it.” Over on her Instagram account, Cecilia has been collecting weirdly satisfying, oddball pieces. She finds things like a landline telephone that is shaped like Harry Potter, a fan designed like a cartoon possum, or miniature and extra large versions of lamps that are made out of dolls.
At her debut show, the Y2K, 2010s party girl aesthetic was strong as a slew of different neon hair colors came with deep side parts, chunky bags and those iconically bright yellow, blue and coral lipsticks found in the beauty aisle of the dollar store. Accessories were endless: Cecilia spent months finding stacks of the right plastic bangles, earrings, bags and sunglasses and re-tinkered them for the runway. Shopping bags with characters got the Cecilia treatment, now covered in stickers, gems, and locks.
“It’s about leveling the playing field,” says Cecilia of her work. “Saying fashion can be for everyone, just like the Dollar Store is for everyone. I’m not trying to say this plastic stuff is bad. I’m just saying mass produced plastic stuff exists. That’s the world that we live in. So I’d rather take a deeper look at it and try to figure out what that means.”
In our current landscape of overly sanitized, minimal fashion on the runways, Cecilia’s work breaks the fourth wall, challenging artifice, performance and luxury. It requires a closer look. She uses the everyday things that are often overlooked, like lenticular blinking mirrors, tights with funny packaging, or pieces with slogans like “be happy, have a nice day” She adds, “I have come across a couple of people kind of being like, ‘Oh, you’re glamorizing poverty,’ but at the end of the day, I can’t afford much else and neither can a lot of people. We’re just trying to appreciate what we do have access to.” It’s the kind of work that stops you in your tracks like a gut punch–makes you think, and provokes the usual.
Cecilia has forged friendships with many of the dollar store owners in the outer boroughs. Some of them know about her work. Some of them text her when they get new arrivals they think she might like. Best of all, Cecilia’s work and her debut show feel exactly like the kind of thing that could only happen in New York.
