Puppets and Puppets Is Shaking Up The New York Design Scene

When Carly Mark started Puppets and Puppets in 2019, she named her label after Puppet, her chihuahua terrier, and Puppet Master, the villain from the Japanese cyberpunk and manga franchise Ghost in the Shell. Because… why not? Not everyone got it, and that was fine by Mark. “My earliest conversations with the CFDA were, ‘Is this an art project? Why did you name your brand this?’” she says. “I was like, ‘OK, cool. Thumbs up.’” 

Mark came to fashion from fine art, where an obsession with Haribo candy was central to her body of work. Puppets and Puppets’ first collections were absurdist parades dedicated to Renaissance fairs and 1980s young adult films. These initial shows tickled the downtown indie creatives as well as the mainstream fashion set, who were eager to see how the next gen of designers could spice up New York Fashion Week.

Puppets and Puppets didn’t go into production until its fourth season. For the first three, Mark did whatever she wanted. “I was like, ‘It’s this ephemeral thing. It’s a performance, an output of expression.’ I went as wild as I could,” she says. Fried-egg tits, cookie belts and bags, and banana motifs seemed like gags at first. Then they became signatures with a cult commercial following. The bags, launched in 2021, are carried without irony by Rosalia, Chloe Wise, Lena Dunham, and seemingly six out of ten people within a quarter-mile radius of Manhattan’s Dimes Square.

Now in its second year of production, Puppets and Puppets is enjoying sales that are set to exceed $1 million this year and the label is stocked by Ssense, Bergdorf Goodman, and a host of other elite retailers. “You do have to have structure and you do have to set up a business,” Mark says. She has been working with veteran designers Katie Hillier and Chris Peters to focus on developing the collection beyond a niche It bag, while the label’s lookbook for resort 2024 was styled by Alex Jordan Harrington, shot by the artist Mary Manning, and stars Mark’s 90-year-old grandmother, Florine Mark, the former president and CEO of the Weight Watchers Group. Mark is keenly aware that nanas and cookie bags play well on TikTok. “That’s not why I made [the brand] at all,” she says, “but it’s definitely pushed things forward.”

Taken from Issue 1 of 10 Magazine USA – FASHION, ICON, DEVOTEE – on newsstands now. Order your copy here. 

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