After a two-year hiatus from the Fashion Week loop, the pioneering clothing label marks its return to the runway on behalf of the underserved and underrepresented.
When luxury streetwear brand No Sesso unveiled its much-anticipated Spring/Summer 2024 collection at their hometown’s Los Angeles Fashion Week last month, it transported its audience into a future world filled with compelling narratives and progressive ideas.
Presented as a striking performance art piece supported by a riveting video backdrop, the collection, titled “Futuro Fish,” was a provocative, sci-fi-inspired exhibition that took viewers on a voyage to undiscovered territories where blurred lines of gender, style and purpose happily coexist. It also displayed how evolved versions of its signature body-skimming silhouettes explored the impact technology will have on human nature and its interchangeability.
Central pieces from the collection included a puffer jacket with asymmetrical zipper detailing and a quilted interior, New-Age-inspired skirts that effortlessly transformed into pants (and vice versa), metallic bustiers, and a spaghetti-strap dress with a convertible zipper, as it doubled down on jersey knit, denim and leather. Functional features like patch pockets and exaggerated hemlines affixed to their cylindrical, trademark Carry Bag smoothly anchored the assortment.
The line encompassed a meticulous array of wearable clothing while logically infusing futuristic ideas of gender-fluid individuality.
Now in its eighth year of business, revolutionary doesn’t begin to describe the ongoing ingenuity behind the label’s designs. Italian for “no sex/no gender,” No Sesso is a diversity-first brand, fearlessly pushing to break barriers and amplify marginalized, especially Black, voices. Under the direction of its founders, Pia Davis and Autumn Randolph, the brand not only made a name for itself with innovative, deconstructed silhouettes that challenge traditional gender roles and celebrate all bodies, but Davis also made headlines as the first trans-woman designer to show on the official calendar during New York Fashion Week in 2019.
Upholding a collective society is at the root of No Sesso’s brand identity. The Davis-Randolph design duo has developed a cult following by purely championing an inclusionary culture that directly appeals to isolated and disempowered groups. By creating an innocuous space of acceptance and belonging, they’ve made the notion of nonconformity beautiful and desirable.
“No Sesso is about community,” Davis explains to the Council of Fashion Designers of America, a not-for-profit trade association which aims to strengthen the global impact of American fashion. “We work with our friends to build everything for the brand. That includes people who work in-house, our models, photographers, stylists, and more. We know and love everyone we work with, and our community is always getting bigger.”
The aesthetics of “The No Sesso Formula” continue to ride a momentous wave in today’s fashion. But looking ahead, Davis and Randolph’s main objective is for the brand to remain an inspiration for individuals to become more community-minded and assign the importance of tolerance and compassion above all else.
“The playing field isn’t level in the world,” Davis says. “It is also important that people of all intersectional identities are given a fighting chance regardless of their identity.”
