Total Look

The fashion designer Susan Cianciolo is finally getting recognition as the artist her devoted fans knew her to be all along. Alix Browne reports.

- Alix Browne

In 1995, Susan Cianciolo made her debut as a fashion designer at Andrea Rosen Gallery, in New York. Two strips of red tape on the floor demarcated a runway, and the first model walked out flipping a switchblade. For the next several years, Cianciolo would continue to stage shows in sync with the New York Fashion Week calendar, but even when she was most in fashion, she was never really of it. In 1996, she showed in an abandoned garage, the makeshift runway cobbled together from shipping pallets she and a friend had fished from Dumpsters and covered with brown craft paper. Another show, in an empty storefront on lower Broadway, included spoken word performances and programs hand-decorated by skate phenom and urban poet Mark Gonzales.