Tanner Richie and Fletcher Kasell have a thing for pussybows. It stems from their mutual affection for all things ’60s and ’70s; their aesthetic is soft, femme, whimsical, romantic, and, above all, nostalgic.
“We want to be known as the pussybow boys,” Richie told me half joking during a preview of their resort 2023 collection. But pussybows are only one of the emerging brand’s signatures. The list also includes ruffles, chunky knits, cheeky messages, upholstery fabrics, vintage wallpaper prints, and pastel ginghams. There’s an old-fashioned charm to Tanner Fletcher, an elegance that stems from combining interior-design elements and vintage references with a certain playfulness and humor that comes with queerness.
Kasell and Richie met in college, and theirs is the definition of a roommate success story. “Fletcher and I met through our school’s roommate finder as freshmen,” says Richie. After hanging out a few times, they “couldn’t get enough of each other” and ended up dating before they even moved in. It was 2020 in the early days of the pandemic when they became business partners as cofounders of Brooklyn-based genderless label Tanner Fletcher. “When COVID started, we were panicking and interviewing at different places to work,” Kasell says. “And at some point we were like, We’re just not going to get jobs,” adds Richie.
Kasell has a background in fashion merchandising and buying, and Richie is in interior design. The combination has proven to be quite fruitful; only three full seasons in, the label is stocked by several retailers—including Ssense, which picked up their first collection.
Looking at a Tanner Fletcher collection evokes a variety of feelings, all depending on who you are. Vintage-loving, Brooklyn-living queer folks may feel seen by the genderless cuts and styling, Depop-obsessed Gen Z’ers might enjoy the retro vibes, and old-money upper crusters could perhaps find a connection in the upcycled household linens and upholstery fabrics. “It’s like Bushwick meets the Upper East Side,” says Richie. “We want to show that we can do Ssense at Bergdorf Goodman, we can sit at both.”
Emerging designers are often asked the “who is your customer?” question. Most answer that she’s a woman in her mid-30s who makes a lot of money and is chic and classic with an edge (whatever that means). But not Kasell and Richie. Their answer is much simpler: “It’s just us, really,” says the former, with the latter adding, “We just really live our brand. This is what we wear, what our apartment looks like. It’s truly an extension of us.”
There’s been a lot of buzz around the idea of genderless fashion over the last couple of seasons, much of it coming, ironically, from the menswear space. The majority of this market is dominated by hoodies, T-shirts, and tank tops, and few designers (see Telfar, Eckhaus Latta, Hood by Air) have managed to create a compelling product that is both genderless and can be sold as such. Past solid marketing, often with edgy gender-diverse castings, most brands revert back to binary systems when it comes to merchandising and selling their clothes—it’s fluid on the runway but menswear or womenswear once it hits a store.
At Tanner Fletcher the story is different, perhaps because it’s personal. “We’re from the Midwest and grew up shopping between men’s and women’s sections,” says Kasell. “We create products that we love and are made for everyone, and then the stores can make a choice.”
Designing genderless clothes comes with compromise. “We have to make sure it truly works for all bodies, so there are no corsets, nothing too fitted, and no seams that fit only one body type,” Kasell says. In fact, they’ve created their own size chart from 0 to 5, which Kasell says is similar to Japanese sizing, and although it’s received some pushback from buyers, it’s working out so far.
For resort, they decided to shoot all pieces on both masc and femme models to appease buyers who “had a hard time getting it past the model the clothes were shot on,” says Richie. The result is convincing and makes a case for the world the duo is trying to build.
Inspired by a fantasy of the English countryside in the ’70s, the collection packages all the Tanner Fletcher signatures in a tightly edited assortment. There’s pastel blue gingham, an abundance of pussybows, and retro tailored shapes cut in fabrics fit for a couch (particularly the retro brown wavy velvet). Their home and interior influences were made even more evident by the floral wallpaper print and the doily crochets. Highlights include a mohair jacket made out of fabric from a blanket manufacturer, a chunky sweater in off-white sequins, and a pair of cargo jeans in a light wash of denim.
The duo’s humor comes through in the graphics. An oversized cardigan is scattered with grandfather clocks because it’s a grandpa sweater. T-shirts, meanwhile, are printed with the words daddy, twink, and butch, “because we’re gay,” Richie made sure to note.
