This season, Christopher John Rogers opened New York Fashion Week with his first runway show since the pandemic. That’s not to say he’s sat out from the twice-yearly industry showcase; in the years since, he cultivated a close community with the 30-something-year-old fellow designers, editors, and stylists who have reframed fashion week from cutthroat to community-focused. So last week, after years spent presenting his collections outside of the CFDA’s twice-yearly showcase in New York, Rogers’ opening night runway was something of a homecoming.
“Since the beginning of CJR we’ve done things in our own way,” Rogers recently told Surface, adding “I think that’s been maybe one of our strong points, our flexibility.” That flexibility led Rogers to turn pandemic delays into an opportunity. “We decided to sell the collection for preseason and it did really well for us,” he said. “It gave us more time to develop evenly throughout the year; stores had bigger budgets, and we were delivering more high octane or declarative clothes at a time when most people were selling more commercial pieces.”
But the intervening years have seen a rising generation of designers—including Rogers—go from being regarded as emerging talents to industry vanguards with credits, credentials, and clout. Rogers won the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2019 before going on to win the CFDA’s Womenswear Designer of the Year award two years later. “Over the past year we’ve been ruminating about where we want to go, what our next steps are,” he said. “[Now] felt like the right time to rejoin a conversation that’s been percolating in New York for a while about designers in flux between emerging and established. And I think there’s something exciting, personally, about presenting a body of work simultaneously with your peers and saying something about the zeitgeist.”
So, having crossed the threshold of 30 years old with five of America’s biggest awards in fashion and commerce, along with a J.Crew collaboration to his name, what does Rogers have to say? It seems like he’s approached the strongest pieces of the collection from a place of quiet confidence that comes from the kind of clarity only age and experience can provide. That maturity extends to his view of the industry and the city’s fashion ecosystem as a whole.
“New York kind of feels like another London, where a lot of the brands are self-funded, we don’t necessarily have investors, and so we’re trying to find our own way forward,” he said. “It’s an exciting time, because for so long, people were trying to find the next Calvin, or Donna, or Ralph. Instead of trying to copy-paste people into preexisting folders, we’re making our own way forward.”
