Katie Gallagher, the downtown designer known for the dark romance of her aesthetic, died at home on July 23, 2022, just shy of her 36th birthday.
Fiercely independent and sure of her vision, Gallagher followed her own path in life and in fashion. She was a hands-on artisan who never relied on surface effects for impact; her interest was in the “bones” of a garment. “She understood construction, which is very difficult, and blended in right away because she understood how we cut and was passionate about it,” remembered Threeasfour’s Gabi Asfour, for whom Gallagher interned in 2008.
Nickolay Saveliev, a graphic designer who fell in love with Gallagher when she was a student at RISD, and lived and worked with her in New York, had something similar to say: “She was obsessed with really technical pattern making; that was something that she became really proud of, so she spent a lot of time researching Balenciaga, Pierre Cardin patterns…. She didn’t want to build anything that was traditional tailoring in any way, she wanted always to subvert it.”
The balancing of what she described as the “cute with the hard” was a central dichotomy in Gallagher’s work. She was as liberal with her use of bows and Swiss dots as with transparency and her preference for black. “Gothic” and “witchy” were some of the adjectives applied to her designs, but Saveliev had another take on that. “Katie wasn’t exactly a goth kid, but she was definitely interested in the macabre and the beauty of decay,” he said. “Basically she wanted to play with the minor keynotes of life and just tried to beautify, to lighten the mood. She was always fascinated by transience and death, and of course in context it’s a little sad. One of her favorite books when she was younger was the Japanese street fashion book, Fruits. I’m sure that you can see the Lolita stuff playing out there.”
In their body-consciousness, Gallagher’s collections seem to have anicicpated the “sexy” work of a new school of female and feminist designers working today. But when asked about that aspect of her work, Saveliev said, “she definitely didn’t think of her work as at all feminist leaning. She was very comfortable with herself and her own body. She was comfortable with nudity…. I think that she never really considered herself of pro-feminism as much as anti-prude.”
Gallagher hinted at this herself in her Web bio, where she wrote, “I live in New York City, but I was born between a farm and a forest somewhere in the United States [rural Pennsylvania]. When I was young, I hated wearing clothes, but I always wore my cat Thomas on my head.” Painting was Gallagher’s first love—”I don’t believe that fashion is the end goal,” she once said—and what it seemed she really wanted to do was create, and share, her personal universe.
Having attracted the attention of the stylist Nicola Formichetti and the fashion collector Daphne Guinness while she was still at school, Gallagher established a base in Chinatown in 2009 and immediately hit the show circuit. It was at a time when it seemed possible to build something from the ground up. “It was always a high stakes, high stress thing. Neither of us had any financial backing, I’m from communist Russia, she’s from rural Pennsylvania; this was definitely a labor of love and also just extreme obsession,” Saveliev said. “I think that that’s what downtown New York was about, people that didn’t have a lot of means, and a few people that did, and everybody working together to be responsible for something cool. There’s really something awesome when you can create and just see it come out in the world.”
Sweet Saba designer Maayan Zilberman came up at the same time as Gallagher, and though they had different aesthetics, she recalled, “we shared a common bond—the belief in a singular vision, the pursuit of creating a visual world that is unique and lyrical-cinematic too. Katie was not concerned with trends, commerce, or seemingly, critique. It was most important to her for her fantasy to live in a reality of her making. It was not for everyone, but if it was for you it was heavenly.”
“The world was not yet fully digital,” noted Saveliev, and “a huge part of the collective story is that people still really wanted to make cool stuff. I think that what it came down to is, ‘Wow, if I work hard enough, I can actually create this little world.’ ” But, of course, the industry’s obsession with newness and change, means that its ecosystem is always in flux, as new “planets” push others out of the way. “The thing about fashion is it gives you piecemeal ideas of feeling really good and really important; like you’re totally broke, but then you end up being invited to Cannes, or whatever. You get little crumbs here and there and they feel really great. I think Katie really just got by on the crumbs,” Saveliev suggested.
Even as her collections garnered notice, Gallagher’s practice remained largely DIY. “She was a person where failure wasn’t an option ever. [Fashion is] a public field and I think that she thought that if she didn’t deliver a collection at some point, she would have screwed up,” said Saveliev. “I think that she didn’t want to disappoint herself, she would consider it losing... She was always broke, but she’d be able to make a collection no matter what, because she could make the patterns, she could sew everything, she could finish everything, she could embroider—she’d always save her hand sewing for when she’d go and visit her parents, she’d just sit on the Greyhound bus [and sew]. She could do everything by herself, she just had to put in the time.” And she always did, Gallagher presented her 19th collection for spring 2019.
“I hope that younger designers who look to her for inspiration will take this lesson from her giant portfolio of work: That it will always pay off to be true to your vision, to keep your hands close to the process, which Katie did, her hands were always torn up from sewing layers of leather or such materials,” Zilberman said.
Gabi Asfour sees the current athleisure trend as one of Gallagher’s legacies. “Now every company does active and has this type of construction. I think she was a great influencer in the industry and she inspired a lot of people.” She did so not only through her work, but by the force of her personality. “She was glamorous and eccentric,” added Asfour. “I liked that she was also athletic, she took care of her health and she was kind of punk, but she was also very sweet; shy, but intelligent… When she got along with somebody, it was kind of like an explosion of expression, because she was so introverted.”
It’s the combination of introversion and passion that led photographer William Eadon—who was working with Gallagher on what would have been her spring 2023 collection, and who has generously shared the street-cast images they were creating together—to describe her as a beautiful contradiction. “Katie was a great listener,” he said. “I felt heard by her.”
