Pets & People

The Rescue Dog Who Became a Fashion Label's North Star

Carly Mark named her cult label Puppets & Puppets after a shelter dog she never planned to adopt. As the brand reinvented itself across an ocean, the dog stayed the one fixed point.

By Leila Torres, Senior Living Editor

December 14, 2025 · 5 min read

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Most brand origin stories are invented in a conference room. This one walked out of an LA animal shelter in someone’s arms. The artist-turned-designer Carly Mark did not go to that shelter to adopt a dog, and she certainly did not go to name a fashion label. She left with both, more or less by accident, and the accident became the through-line of everything she has built since. The clothes have changed, the city has changed, the entire business model has changed. The dog has not.

The adoption she did not mean to make

Mark tells the story as a kind of ambush. She went to a Los Angeles shelter with a friend, Michael, and no intention of taking anyone home. Michael fell for one dog instantly but already had two of his own, so he simply set the dog in Mark’s lap. The dog licked her face and went completely limp with trust in her arms.

“I must have dissociated,” Mark says, “because when I came to, I was fifty dollars poorer and walking out of the shelter with him still in my arms.” She named him Puppet, and the bond was immediate and total. “There was never a moment he didn’t know I was the one who walked him out of that place. We’ve been completely bonded since.” Ask her the best part of being his person and the answer is expansive: “Everything is the best part. I’ve never had such a genuine and pure bond with any living thing before.”

How a shelter dog ended up on the label

Mark launched Puppets & Puppets, which she founded in 2018 with Ayla Argentina, at New York Fashion Week in February 2019, and it became one of the buzziest names on the calendar almost overnight. The aesthetic grew out of her fine-art practice, where costume-making was always a step in the process. “I would develop these characters and then make clothing for them and style them,” she has explained. “I was always sort of styling my sculptures.” Making custom looks for magazine covers felt like the same muscle, and she and her collaborators enjoyed it enough to keep going.

The name, though, was never about the clothes. It was about the dog. “I always say it’s his brand, not mine,” Mark says. “At the end of the day, he’s the priority over everything. Given how much love he’s brought into my life, the least I can do is honor his name.” As for where “Puppet” came from in the first place: Mark is a devotee of Ghost in the Shell, whose villain is the Puppet Master, and she and her best friend have matching Puppet Master tattoos. Naming the dog Puppet simply fit.

His influence on the work is not sentimental filler, either. “There’s a lot of humor in the brand,” Mark says. “Puppet is a very funny creature. He definitely inspires us to laugh more while making the garments.” That humor is the label’s signature, most famously in the Cookie bag, a leather top-handle purse crowned with a hyperrealistic resin chocolate-chip cookie where a logo would normally go.

The pandemic, up close

Puppet’s role got bigger when the world got smaller. The brand paused early in the pandemic. “It didn’t feel right to be putting energy into creating something to sell as the world was navigating such chaos,” Mark said at the time. During the long stretch at home, the dog became a genuine anchor. “Having him as a companion really helped with the anxiety I felt during the pandemic,” she says. “Puppet did love it, we’re closer than ever now. I have trouble being away from him.”

That closeness carried into the working day. Puppet commutes with her, on foot, every day. “We walk to and from the studio every day,” Mark says. “The whole team loves him. He brings us constant comedic relief.” He is, by her account, a specific and eccentric animal: he makes intense eye contact, sings along to sirens, likes salad, nips at you when the doorbell rings, sleeps directly on top of whoever is in the bed regardless of available space, and throws socks in the air to catch them himself. Runway appearances, sadly, are out. “If the shows didn’t make him so nervous, I would,” Mark says. “Maybe I’ll hold him and walk the show one season.”

What changed, and what didn’t

The chapter after this interview was a hard one, and it reframes the whole story. In 2024, Mark announced she was moving Puppets & Puppets to London, leaving the New York Fashion Week schedule, shrinking her team, and winding down ready-to-wear to concentrate on the accessories that actually pay the bills, led by that Cookie bag. She was unusually candid about why: this was survival, not strategy. She has described a meeting with her finance manager who told her the label had roughly eight months of operating costs left, and she could no longer sell enough clothing to afford to build it in New York. The move to London, and the pivot to accessories, was how she kept the brand alive.

Through all of it, the one constant is the dog who was never supposed to be hers. Businesses can relocate across an ocean and reinvent what they sell, and Puppet stays exactly where he has always been: at the center of Mark’s world, which is the same place the whole brand started.