Editors’ Pick: VFILES’ Recent Runway Winners

Everyone needs a hand up, especially emerging fashion designers. For close to a decade, VFILES has provided a platform for integrated discovery, collaboration, and exposure. These collaborations can be found in fashion, music and video content. VFILES platforms celebrate what is now and next, with a heavy emphasis on the next.

VFILES gives a helping hand to emerging fashion designers not only in its collaborative efforts, but also by presenting these designers to a larger audience, as well as giving consumers an opportunity to shop VFILES emerging designers. Additionally, VFILES runway show during New York Fashion Week: The Shows is one of the most sought-after tickets of the fashion week season.

For the spring 2019 season, VFILES has chosen four designers that will present during New York Fashion Week: The Shows. Shuting Qiu, Elena Velez, WINDOWSEN, and MARRKNULL will present their spring 2019 collections during the VFILES runway show on September 5 at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center.

WINDOWSEN is a unisex Antwerp-based brand founded by Sensen Lii after his graduation from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp. The brand is inspired by futuristic references and the artistry of drag performance, and aims to push the boundaries between sportswear and couture.

Elena Velez is a recent graduate of Parsons The New School for Design. Her namesake women’s wear brand seeks to challenge current conventions of excess, fast fashion, and ecological disregard, while stressing quality of design and functional longevity.

MARRKNULL is a Beijing-based women’s wear brand founded by Wei Wang and Tim Shi in 2016. Inspired by many different aspects of Chinese environments, the brand aims to reinterpret traditional Chinese dress with new and unique techniques in fabric manipulation and silhouette.

Shuting Qiu’s eponymous women’s wear brand was established in 2017 after her graduation from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp. The brand explores the concepts of femininity, power and self-expression through whimsical asymmetric silhouettes and strong color contrasts.—William S. Gooch