Most fashion labels that make clothes for pets do it as a wink, a one-off novelty for a lookbook. Gauntlett Cheng did it almost by accident, liked it, and let it become part of who they are. The Brooklyn brand, founded in 2015 by Jenny Cheng and Esther Gauntlett, is known for a certain ‘90s-grunge sensibility, crinkly textures, bandage-like knits, and clingy silhouettes that flatter a real body. What sets them apart from the rest of the downtown fashion pack is that “a real body,” in their world, might belong to a Shiba Inu.
Two studios, one baptism by fire
The label’s origin story runs through a single formative job. Cheng studied textiles at the Rhode Island School of Design, and in her final year interned with Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, the founders of the New York label Eckhaus Latta. She stayed on after graduating. Gauntlett, meanwhile, grew up in Perth, on Australia’s west coast, studied in Melbourne, and won a U.S. green card in a lottery she’d entered more or less on a whim. When the notification came, she moved. She started working with Eckhaus and Latta within weeks of landing, knowing almost no one in the city and putting in marathon days in the studio. That studio is where she and Cheng met.
What they took from that apprenticeship shaped everything after. The Eckhaus Latta studio was small and intimate, with samples made by hand in-house rather than shipped off to overseas factories. Seeing clothes come together that way, knit and sewn and assembled by a tight circle of friends and relatives pitching in, convinced both women that they could build something of their own on the same terms. The collaborative, community-first way of working, leaning on friends and artists in their circle, became a core part of the Gauntlett Cheng identity.
How the pets got involved
The animals arrived the way a lot of good ideas do: casually. For their fall/winter 2018 presentation, the designers had, as usual, cast friends and family to walk. Cheng’s sister had an Italian Greyhound named Toby and kept asking for clothes for him, so the pair simply folded pet looks into the show. It felt less like a stunt than a natural extension of a runway that was already full of people they loved.
Making the clothes was another matter. Patterns for pets, they quickly learned, are their own discipline. Legs come out of the bottom of a garment rather than the sides, and the “body” in question arrives in a wild range of sizes and shapes, deep-chested here, long-backed there. That challenge is a big reason so much of their pet work leans on stretchy, forgiving fabrics. One of their signature materials is almost like a bandage, gently compressive, which happens to work beautifully as a snug under-layer on a dog.
The learning curve produced some very practical rules, too. Delicate, hand-wash-only pieces are fine for a person heading to a gallery opening. They are useless on a dog going to the park, so pet garments had to be machine washable from the start. Fashion, filtered through the reality of a muddy dog, gets humbler in a hurry.
The fit models are family
If designing for humans means fitting a sample on yourself, designing for pets means assembling a small menagerie of consultants. Gauntlett’s own cat, a vocal, cuddly Siamese named Flipper with, by her account, a personality more dog than cat, is a reluctant model at best, prone to freezing and flattening herself to the floor at the first sign of an outfit. Cheng, who doesn’t have pets of her own, has leaned on her parents’ 16-year-old Maltipoo, Dondon, as a steady fit model, and on a rotating cast of friends’ dogs, including, memorably, sizing a sweater on a large Saluki whose long, lean frame demanded its own pattern.
The brand’s most joyful moment in pet fashion came courtesy of the retailer SSENSE, which has a notable pet section and asked the duo to make pieces again. The resulting capsule paired with a human collection, and the campaign shoot became a small, happy circus outside their studio in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn: a handful of dogs, a cat, and a crew of friends, hairstylists, and makeup artists, everyone somehow getting along. That, the designers have said, is the real point of including animals at all. It pulls the seriousness out of fashion and swaps in something sillier and warmer.
What’s new since this was written
Gauntlett Cheng has since hit a real milestone: a 10-year anniversary runway show during New York Fashion Week, a splashy spring/summer outing full of the evening dresses and rhinestone-and-sequin knits that made the label’s name. The brand continues to sell through SSENSE and to keep its deliberately slow, once-a-year-ish schedule, a pace the founders adopted for the sake of both their sanity and the planet. And the interspecies design streak has stuck around, which is exactly what you’d hope from a label that treats a well-dressed dog not as a gimmick but as another member of the family worth making something beautiful for.
References
- Cultured Magazine. “Esther Gauntlett and Jenny Cheng Make Art Worth Wearing.” culturedmag.com
- Interview Magazine. “Inside Gauntlett Cheng’s 10-Year Anniversary Show.” interviewmagazine.com
- SSENSE. “Gauntlett Cheng.” ssense.com
