10 Years of Gauntlett Cheng
From fantasy to reality, keeping your fire
Gauntlett Cheng is a New York label founded in 2014 by Esther Gauntlett and Jenny Cheng. They design based on what they’re dealing with each season, creating a wardrobe for their emotional state at the time. Their clothes are informed by their desires, anxieties, fantasies, city, friends, and families.
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Gauntlett Cheng evolve since its inception. I first met Jenny in college at RISD and we instantly became friends after discovering we grew up in neighboring towns on Long Island. I started what would become my personal archive while with Jenny. All throughout college, we’d go on weekly outings outside of Providence to Savers—spending hours there and filling our carts to the brim every time.
Post graduation, we spent our 20s navigating our lives together. We were roommates in our first apartment, worked at our first office jobs, and talked at length about our unknown futures. For Jenny, this would soon emerge as Gauntlett Cheng after meeting Esther while interning at Eckhaus Latta. Fast forward to now, Gauntlett Cheng is 10 years old and I’m beginning this project that has come out of my countless conversations with Jenny. It was obvious to me that this newsletter should start with Gauntlett Cheng.
Last month, Gauntlett Cheng’s SS25 runway show “Dream Baby Dream” celebrated the 10 year anniversary of the label. The use of metallic knits, sheer fabrics, and ruched elastics synonymous with the brand felt like the perfect culmination of all collections prior. A few weeks after the show, I lugged a bag filled with all of the Gauntlett Cheng pieces I’ve collected throughout the years to Esther and Jenny’s studio in Dumbo to talk with them about the pieces and their past collections.
What I love about Gauntlett Cheng is that they create on their own terms, piecing together a world that balances the duality in everything: part fantasy, part reality, and led by an undercurrent of instinct. For Esther and Jenny, elements that have become brand signatures are intuitive. “I don’t think there was any part of us that was like, 'Let's go through the archive’, 'What do we love?’, ‘What do we still want to do?’, ‘What’s our greatest hits?’. But it’s nice to see that we don’t even have to think about it,” Esther told me when talking about the approach to their SS25 collection.
They talked to me about creating in fantasy realms in the past to now creating for themselves, keeping your fire, and how they saw a shift in their SS17 collection. For me, I saw their SS19 collection as a turning point. The items I’ve collected below span a bit of everything from the past collections, but coincidentally a majority of it is from those two pivotal collections that grew into hallmarks of the brand.
♡ ACB
⊹ See all available items on attachmentstyles.us ⊹
⊹ FW16 Pleated Wrap Skirt
Never Step Where You Have Fallen
Jenny: “Never step where you have fallen” was a phrase that a jeweler told us.
Esther: A lot of our show titles can be interpreted either way—is it sad or is it happy motivation? The whole thing is, ‘Keep your fire burning, keep going, keep trying, you’re going to do it, keep smiling.’ When we’re doing the collection, we’re like ‘Okay still smiling. We’re trying, we’re really trying, we’re going, we’re doing it’.Jenny: With all of our show titles, it’s always ‘we’ve got to keep pushing ourselves’.
⊹ SS17 Gathered Business Shirt
You Gonna Cowboy Up or Just Lay There and Die?
Jenny: It’s nice to see how many things we started this season. I feel like that was one of my favorite seasons, the boat, the sunset.
⊹ SS17 Striped Mohair Miniskirt
You Gonna Cowboy Up or Just Lay There and Die?
Esther: This was our first full collection, start to finish.
Jenny: I think this feels the most like us moving forward. There was this sexiness in this collection that still continues.
⊹ SS17 Monogram Pajama Pants
You Gonna Cowboy Up or Just Lay There and Die?
Esther: It was also the first season where I was like “This is what this is; this is what our brand looks like.”
⊹ FW17 GC Rose Baby T
I've Been To Paradise But I've Never Been To Me
Esther: I remember right after this season I remember crying and thinking I didn’t do a good enough job, like I failed this season. But now I look back and I’m like this is sexy and cool. I really beat myself up mentally and now I’m like, “Oh no I like it”.
I think SS20 was the first collection I started just really wearing all of the time. It was the first time it was really like, “Oh I’m making clothes for myself as opposed to this kind of fantasy thing”. I mean, now I want this. But we were doing this in a fantasy realm at the time. It was a really nice change moment for me.
⊹ FW18 Gobby Padded Scarf
Happy & Healthy
Jenny: I saw this painting and this is what inspired me to ask Gobby to make some illustrations. I wanted to do a little conversational print when Gobby sent us sketches of a drunken moon and a sun passed out on the sidewalk.
⊹ FW18 Gobby Conversational T
Happy & Healthy
Esther: The original print that we ordered didn’t come in time. We had to get it same-day digitally printed in Midtown. It was so expensive, so we were like, “We’re only getting three yards of it”. A lot of the clothes were really short because we didn’t have enough fabric to make the samples for the show. And the fabric came back with a large print, but it was meant to be miniature.
Jenny: I hadn’t printed the pattern out when I was making the file. But it was a happy accident because you get to see so much detail that you didn’t see otherwise.
⊹ SS19 Bandage Twist Skirt
is it your first time?
Jenny: I’m actually trying to make a skirt for myself right now. I wanted to wear it this past summer. I didn’t have time to finish it but I’m gonna make it in this specific color. This one exactly. Now looking at all these things I’m like, “Wow I want to do this again” or “Why doesn’t this continue?”
Esther: I feel like it took a long time for me to want to wear the clothes. I didn’t for a really long time.
⊹ SS19 Paper Tank
is it your first time?
Jenny: All of these knits got lost. This stylist was pulling all of these paper knits for a Charli XCX video and the production team lost all of it so we don’t even have the samples. The dress, the pants, the tank—we don’t have any of it. It’s erased from history.
Esther: Maybe someone’s wearing it somewhere.
Thank you to Esther & Jenny <3
Campaign images provided by Gauntlett Cheng
All items above are available for purchase on attachmentstyles.us :•)