If you’ve slipped into a pair of lace tights or stepped out sans pants this season, then you owe Shayna Arnold a “thank you”. The New York-based stylist’s work for brands like Maryam Nassir Zadeh and Gimaguas has paved the way for many of this year’s most viral fashion trends. The tights-as-pants look? That was Shayna. How about 2021’s crochet bikini craze? Shayna, again. For over half a decade, the stylist has been creating eclectic, out-of-the-box looks for some of fashion’s most influential indie labels and Instagram brands. Now, with the launch of her first photo book Swans, she’s stepping out on her own — and pushing her styling sensibilities to the limit.
Considering her intuitive approach to styling, it’s really no surprise to learn that Shayna began her career on the design track. After spending her childhood dressing up her twin sisters and assisting at her mother’s boutique, the Ohio native moved from the suburbs of Dayton to downtown Cincinnati to attend the university’s fashion design program. There, she completed the degree’s requisite five design internships, honing her homespun aesthetic at the ateliers of Dion Lee, Anne-Sophie Back and, most notably, Rodarte, the sister-led LA brand known for their experimental, textile-driven creations. This sense of experimentation informed Shayna’s graduate collection, a series of garments made from unusual materials like neoprene, chicken wire and skateboard grip tape (“not the most comfortable material!” she laughs). “I was inspired by textures and materials,” she says. “From there, I’d figure out how to create silhouettes and make them wearable.”
After graduation, Shayna moved to New York where she worked briefly as an assistant designer for the now-defunct knitwear label Ohne Titel before deciding to take a step back from designing and towards styling. It was during these early days, working as an assistant stylist and at Soho’s Cafe Gitane, that she dove back into the experimentalism of her school years. In their off-hours, Shayna and her Gitane co-workers (all creatives themselves) would put on shoots together; rather than buying clothes for these projects, Shayna began making her own. The one-off textile experimentations eventually developed into a larger “open-ended project” and “personal practice”, with Shayna shooting her textile creations, for posterity’s sake, on her twin sisters, Sydney and Sasha.
It’s these photographs, taken between 2018 and 2023, that make up the pages of Swans. The book serves not only as a documentation of Shayna’s designs, but also of family and of home. “I’m the oldest of four children. I have two twin sisters who I’ve used as my muses and fit models since high school,” she says. “Having them be a part of these personal projects for me is always very meaningful. That connection means a lot and they’re always open to things I want to try — they’re these blank slate collaborators.”
Many of the photos that make up the project were shot across the three sisters’ apartments in New York; when they returned to Ohio at the beginning of the pandemic, they continued staging the photoshoots at their parents’ house, their grandparents’ old farm and other hometown locales. Shot on black-and-white and saturated colour film, the images embody the intimacy of sisterhood, the Gaussian blur of memory and the enigma that enshrouds the creative process. Across them, the twins occupy the thresholds of open doors, lurch across kitchen tiles, loom in toile-wallpapered rooms and lie on shag carpets wearing swathes of lace, tulle and satin.
The collection’s titular swan appears in the tome’s final image, a piece of metal wire boning twisted into the shape of two cygnets. Shayna had created the piece for one of her earlier projects and initially envisioned it as a mask. “In Swans, [the piece is] worn by Sasha as a belt, layered over a green velvet dress,” Shayna says. “The swan motif reminds me of my sisters, who are twins and are forever connected.”
However, Sydney and Sasha aren’t Shayna’s only muses. “My love for and approach to abstract materials or hard materials, I believe, was actually influenced by my grandfather and father,” she says, pointing to a photograph of the twins wearing a rustic wooden purse. Elsewhere, the sisters don swatches of leather and fabric bedecked in blocks and slabs of wood: small, wearable sculptures. “My grandfather practiced carpentry as a hobby and built homes, and my father also builds homes. So I think my love for many materials and forms was partly an influence from them.” They’re the reason Shayna loves a good hardware store find, such as the drawer liners, which she describes as “rubberised lace”, that adorn the collection’s draped bodices like sprigs of tulle and netting.
Photographer Nick Sethi’s gallery-slash-living space, Dakota, served as an appropriately intimate backdrop for the Swans New York launch party. For the event, the stylist staged an art installation, bringing her textile creations off the page — and off the body — and into the real world for the very first time. “It was interesting to see all those pieces function in a different way, interacting with the structures in the space,” she says. Amidst the Lower East Side apartment’s sparse furnishings and paintings by Shayna’s boyfriend Cody Goebl, a swathe of feather-trimmed tulle became not a veil but a lampshade. Elsewhere, another satin swathe rested haphazardly across the back of a chair, the way a sweater might be discarded after a long day.
Like Swans, this kind of installation was a first for Shayna. And, in conjunction, it served as somewhat of a revelation. “Considering this book and how I’m drawn to 3D materials, I’d love to make furniture or experiment with sculpture,” she says. “Those are things I want to explore next.”
Swans is out now and available for purchase here.
Credits
Photography Shayna Arnold.