Carly Mark has been thinking about money. This is not unusual. Young designers, more often than not, are plagued with irksome thoughts about cash: how much they’ve got, how long it will last and, most importantly, how they will make more of it. For Carly, however, the doll-faced designer behind darling avant-garde label Puppets and Puppets, all this thinking about money has led her to make a pretty drastic decision. She’s no longer going to be making clothes.
Formerly a fine artist, Carly founded Puppets and Puppets in 2019 with her studio assistant Ayla Argentina, who has since left the brand. Their first three shows were an ecstatic representation of New York’s young downtown fashion scene: bizarre, costume-coded get ups modelled by an ultra-cool cast of A-list friends. Jump to AW24, however, and there had been a major vibe shift. The casting felt more serious, the garments toned down, yet not quite ‘commercial’. Destroyed hoodies in black and cream peppered the show, a faux fur stole wrapped around a model’s torso and a cap-slash-train-slash-dress rendered one of the models a Bruegel-esque princess. There was one major issue though: sell-through. “I couldn’t keep the price of the clothes down and the community that loves Puppets couldn’t afford it,” she explains. “I was in a bad cycle and I couldn’t get past it.”
If you know Puppets (colloquial shorthand for the brand’s full name) you’ll also know that in February this year it announced its departure from the New York Fashion Week schedule, the shuttering of the ready-to-wear department to focus on accessories and a relocation of the brand’s operation to London. It was a practical decision. Last summer, Carly had a meeting with her finance manager who delivered the news that Puppets and Puppets only had eight more months of operating costs to hand. Although it was a shock, she was anticipating a drastic overhaul of her business. She had already been flirting with the idea of moving Puppets out of New York for at least a year prior to the announcement, but was holding out hope that she could make it work in New York. But, as she tells me, “we don’t trade bags for sheep.” Nope, we trade them for cold hard cash – and she had to figure out how to make more of it.
For Carly, this meant focusing on her best selling product: bags. These, between “funny and sexy” as Carly has previously put it, now make up the lifeblood of the brand. Puppets’ signature ‘Cookie’ bag, featuring a life-sized resin chocolate chip cookie plonked on bags in place of a logo, has become an It Bag in its own right, spotted on downtown darlings, DJs and potential presidential children alike. Now, however, she says she’s moving on from the resin food. “I never intended that to be a continuous thing,” she explains, “I’m very uninterested in things that corner me.”
Her big move came to light in a New York Times interview with Carly published just days before the Puppets and Puppets AW24 show in February – the label’s eleventh season and last on the New York Fashion Week calendar. Her announcement received mixed responses. Those who had got to know Carly’s work over the years, having watched the label move from its kooky origins to the slick yet relentlessly offbeat operation it’s become today (a Puppets piece warrants a ‘where did you get that?!’ wherever you go), it was a dark day. For some, however, it was an excuse to kick a dog when it was already down.
“The higher ups came out of the woodwork, and they were like, ‘Well, you’re not even talented anyways,’” she tells me, her face deadpan. “And I was just like, ‘I knew you thought so.’” A rumour that someone at the CFDA had called her ‘ungrateful’ has been doing the rounds and a review of her last show penned by Vanessa Friedman criticised the fit of the garments. “My immediate thought was, I know you’ve never tried anything on.” It clearly still strikes a nerve. “Do you know how hard it is to get clothes to fit a model? Do you know how much money that costs?” A lot, by the way – $35 an hour to be exact. On top of exorbitant rent prices for a studio and rising living costs in New York City, it was all getting a bit too much. “I did just under a million in sales last year and I still couldn’t keep the doors open,” she says.
We’re sitting in the library lounge of the London outpost of the Standard Hotel, where Carly is temporarily staying. Today she is wearing a perfectly washed-out black tank top (“I rolled out of bed”) and jeans matched with a pair of little heeled black booties. The jeans are of her own design and the tank is Walmart. “Lately I’ve been wearing a lot of Walmart – Puppets and Walmart,” she gives me a wry smile, “there are issues with fast fashion, of course, but I don’t care about designer things in the way that I once did, I care more about style.”
“New York raised me, but I’m tired – I want to sleep a little bit better, I want a better quality of life.”
Carly has become a front-facing ambassador for her brand, her dark, wide eyes and protruding cheekbones now almost as recognisable as the brand’s signature ‘Cookie’ bag. “I can handle the spotlight, but generally it does make me feel weird,” she admits. Now, given that the label is moving into the production of accessories only, it’s likely her image will become even more prominent. Being the face of the business was a business decision. “I do have to be like, ‘Hey, this is me, I’m proud of what I do, I love this bag, this is how I wear it,’ because when an audience connects with a designer, the sales do really well.”
She’s not quite settled in London yet. For the last few months she has been flitting between Michigan (where she’s from and where Puppet, her black chihuahua mix, is living at the moment), Paris (where the brand’s stylist Taylor Thoroski lives) and London. It seems her move wasn’t just a financial decision. Katie Hillier (the celebrated designer formerly of Marc by Marc Jabobs) who works with Carly on the brand’s accessories production is based in London. More importantly, though, having recently turned 36, Carly is looking to live at a different pace. “I was in New York for 18 years. The city raised me, and I have a lot of respect for it, but I’m tired – I want to sleep a little bit better, I want a better quality of life.” London is expensive and fast-paced too, but after the concrete grit of New York, it’s providing a welcome change. Carly’s friend Lena Dunham has also made the move to London for reasons not dissimilar. “I really love London,” Carly tells me, “I like how organised the Tube is, I love all the trees.” Paris, she decided, was too hot during the summer (she gets climate-crisis induced heat anxiety) and the schedule was too overcrowded. London felt just right.
Carly calls the brand’s London Fashion Week debut a “style show” rather than a fashion show. “It’s a full show but it’s clothes that I’ve found, sourced with Taylor, embellished, altered, so I’m creating a world, I’m telling a story, I’m creating a Puppets world, styling a Puppets person, but more as a way to give context to the bags.” Held at the ICA, the show saw models in various states of undress move around a space cordoned off with black velvet rope. The presentation was really a fashion show slowed down to a snail’s pace. Basic garments sourced from various fast fashion outlets – jeans, black undies, white tees and polo shirts – were accentuated by gloves in varying lengths, tie-up leg braces, lacy veils, baker boy hats and fedoras. There was a sense of humour to the offering, an irony to the proposition that anyone can be part of the ‘Puppets world’ by ordering a pair of skinny jeans on Amazon. “Sometimes all you have to do is take something and put it in a new context and that’s having a conversation,” she explains of her radical proposition.
The latest bag for SS25, called the ‘Pillow’, moves away from the surrealist foodstuffs. It’s more pared back, less obvious: a pleather puff in black, cream, brown, burnt umber or silver in the rectangular shape of an airline pillow (“in my head, I was like, ‘I moved to Europe, so aeroplanes!’”). Its body is inspired by the distressed leather of Sarah Lucas’ artwork Donkey Kong Diddle Eye (2000), the corners hugged by glossy black PVC straps inspired by the perfectly engineered rubber bands that hold magazines together in Japan. There’s a new logo too, designed by SPECIAL OFFER, Inc. of Brat phenomenon fame, embroidered on to a polo shirt and developed into mask-like makeup for the SS25 show. All in all, it’s feeling very grown up.
Already Carly is seeing the results of her drastic decision. The books are balanced, she’s enjoying a new way of working, finding new collaborations and pursuing the freedom to do what she wants. “This has never been about branding, this is a conversation about fashion and the business of fashion,” she says, her roots as a fine artist shining through. The first three Puppets and Puppets shows were never put into production, interpreted as a slight against the fashion system. Downsizing the business has allowed her to reconnect with her conceptual edge. Now, she says, “I’m having fun in the way that I was back then, and it’s so freeing. I think I’ve fallen back in love with fashion.”
Text: Eilidh Duffy
Photography: Alex Arauz
Video: Mona Bakht