January 6, 2026 |
Sometimes you need to back yourself. These ten New York-based creatives are building worlds, brand and careers in their own way. Catch them in their moment. Art, humanity and creativity are always in flux, which is why transformation, even if it’s not in focus, is unavoidable. It is something these 10 figures from the worlds of art, food, nightlife and fashion not only know, but live.
For artist Ebecho Muslimova, transformation can be found in the place where drawing meets paint, or where a new exhibition space makes its way into her work. For the chef Flynn McGarry, an interest in design morphed a whole new part of his restaurant business and informed his next venture.
Whether it’s Rafael Prieto’s typefaces altering the way we see spaces, the undulating drape of the designer Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen’s napkin dress or the writer Celeste Yim’s words drawing humour from the darkest drama, these creators are making not one thing or many things, but movement itself.
Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen, fashion designer
There is no one making clothes like Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen, quite literally. “I look at pre-Industrial Revolution silhouettes and pick and choose what I think is interesting, and how we thought about clothing for centuries before,” she says. The result is handmade, one-of-a-kind, ethereal pieces where elements of the Victorian, ghostly, historical and natural abound, like her napkin dress (worn by Julia Fox); her foraged stick pannier made from dried vines and vintage tea-stained lace; her cropped-but-tailored stomacher tees. Everything is made to order and all her materials are vintage or deadstock (that she finds “by nature are artisanal and unique”).
Whalen, who also teaches at NYC’s Pratt Institute and Rhode Island School of Design, takes a philosophical approach to fashion. “I have this question of what we actually assign value to, especially when thinking about how to build and run my own business,” the 30-year-old designer says. Wearing an oversized silk dress she made to be a costume in a play, she’s seated at a sewing machine in her East Williamsburg studio, which fits its occupant and output: a suspended maze of frocks is punctuated by metal armour on the wall and a large rope – braided by her friend with foraged lemongrass – hangs from the ceiling, holding candles from her last presentation. Her performance art-esque gatherings have become a must-see during NYFW.
Going forward, Whalen isn’t looking to expand in any traditional sense, but she’s made a handbag (constructed from vintage leather pants and wool blankets), is leaning towards menswear and is examining colours beyond the whites and creams that have dominated her collections. “Right now, my ultimate goal is just to improve the work,” she says. “And continue to make something undeniable.”
Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen, fashion designer
Lotus L. Kang, artist
Lotus L. Kang’s work begins with what should not be. “I work with these large sheets of photographic film that I expose improperly, often framing my work around the idea of misuse,” she says. Kang, 40, previously worked with large metal sculpture and photograms before embarking on this new “tanning” process, which involves treating film in greenhouses before applying it to installations.
Her work is world-building, as seen at her spring 2025 show at David Zwirner’s 52 Walker gallery in New York, where two greenhouse structures with mirrored floors – one containing her tanned sheets of film – faced off against each other. “A greenhouse structure is this permeable vessel that holds cycles of time and life and death. It kind of beats up time,” Kang says. She’s also a twin, which figures into her work as well. “I came into being with another body around me. So that definitely affects my relationship to intimacy with materials, with a dissolving of a boundary.” Born in Toronto in 1985, the 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship winner got her MFA from Bard College, before showing at museums and galleries the world over, including NYC’s Whitney, Kunstverein Munich, and MCA Chicago.
“My family history has migration and fleeing, as my father’s side is from North Korea,” she says. So there is this kind of history of resilience and figuring it out as you go along. That’s how I approach my practice.” As that practice moves forward, her work and ideas become no less complicated, but more layered, quite literally. “I’m thinking about ecosystems that overlap – tidal flats or mud flats.” This isn’t a departure but a continuation of her work at Bard. “I can go back 10 years and see the way it’s leaked through this entire time,” she says. “My practice is very leaky.”
Lotus L. Kang, artist
Celeste Yim, comedy writer
“You’d think they would vet us more,” jokes Celeste Yim, the 29-year-old writer whose three-sketch packet earned them a staff writer’s job at Saturday Night Live in 2020. The child of a “gallerist turned lawyer” (mum) and a “dentist turned artist” (dad), Yim was happy to cut their teeth on Toronto’s stages (like John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Mike Myers and Samantha Bee before them) before coming to New York to work on their playwriting master’s at NYU.
On SNL, Yim managed to levy offbeat subjects into viral clips, like 2023’s hospital sketch in which Timothée Chalamet played the gay pop icon and former YouTuber Troye Sivan. “Obviously Lorne [Michaels, SNL’s creator-showrunner] doesn’t know who that is,” they say while sipping iced coffee at Smør, a Danish café in Brooklyn. “My work in the past few years is to take things that are niche and put them in a container that you would put something generally funny into.”
Yim left SNL in August after five seasons at the notoriously competitive show. As a first job it set the bar pretty high, so what could they look to next? “I don’t think very much is funny right now. I’m struggling with that actually,” they admit before sharing that their work is taking a dramatic turn. Yim is currently writing for Apple TV+’s The Dealer, a drama about the art world. Which isn’t to say that comedy can’t be found in the classic places. At the end of last season’s SNL 50th anniversary show, they found themselves standing backstage next to Paul McCartney. “I had just a normal conversation with him about nothing,” they say. “I made a joke. He laughed.”
Celeste Yim, comedy writer
Ebecho Muslimova, artist
“I learn from the paintings,” Ebecho Muslimova says. “And that’s not just a cop-out so I don’t have to explain things.” Her works centre on a corpulent, ribald, transgressive female figure named Fatebe (pronounced ‘fatty-bee’) whose contortions and sexuality are deftly incorporated into technically complicated paintings, interacting with landscapes, objects and spaces that contain them. “When I started out with her, I had these very specific rules,” says 41-year-old Muslimova, who began drawing the figure in art school as a distraction from more ‘serious’ painting work. “The problem was that I’d started painting and I didn’t want to just slap a drawing on a painting, because that’s lame, but I also didn’t want to render her in painting, which is also weird and gimmicky. So how do I preserve her as an entity that is a drawing but in a painting?” The answer grows more involved with every series.
Born in Russia and raised in New Jersey – “I went to [Manhattan’s] LaGuardia High School, but lived in Jersey City, so we had to do this big lie”– she attended the university Cooper Union (getting a BFA in 2010) in the East Village and was then repped by David Zwirner. She’s currently showing at Norway’s Kunsthall Stavanger, where Fatebe appears within the gallery’s design elements. The character serves as catharsis: “Fatebe is able to express things I can’t for many reasons – society, physics – plus I don’t want to,” Muslimova says. “She’s like the serpent that shakes out whatever needs to be shook out.” And she’s not going anywhere yet. “Initially, the joke was I just do this character for the rest of my life. But that’s what I’m doing now. And it hasn’t stopped being interesting.”
Ebecho Muslimova, artist
Yasmin Kaytmaz, café owner, publican and artist
“The bridles are in the mail,” says Yasmin Kaytmaz of impending ornamentals. The self-proclaimed horse girl has opened Derby Cup Coffee, a café in New York’s Chinatown that marries the downtown arts scene with Kaytmaz’s other great loves: horses, racing and betting.
Kaytmaz, 29, herself an artist, has helped to curate the after-openings scene as a partner in The River, the windowless woody saloon on Bayard Street, also in Chinatown. Her new establishment, co-owned with The River’s David Komurek, is decorated in part like a stable’s tack room (there’s a water spigot with a horse-head handle emerging from the coffee bar) and is a space to enjoy art, like her current selections of equine- themed works by Jamian Juliano-Villani, David Muenzer, Sam Anderson and Antonius Höckelmann. More than just a café, it has the feeling of a scene, maybe a new bar like the now-closed Max Fish, but with caffeine. The seats are few. The walls are stained aubergine. The vibe is casual and chic, as are the people who come by: when Kaytmaz posted about its opening on her Instagram, Chloë Sevigny commented, asking for the address.
“I like it when people run into each other here,” Kaytmaz says. She’s figuring out how to add house-made sandwiches to the cake selection (cardamom, olive oil, pistachio). It offers specialised drinks, like a tahini latte, but also just good everyday coffee and espresso from Brooklyn’s Variety Coffee Roasters. Kaytmaz would like to open more of these and fill some of the city’s coffee deserts, but for now, “I’m excited for it to be nice and chill – have an espresso, sit outside, hang out, run into people, see some art, but in a different area than where it’s all happening right now. A little bit more relaxed.”
Yasmin Kaytmaz, café owner, publican and artist
Rafael Prieto, creative director
“I’m not a designer, I’m a creative director,” Rafael Prieto says matter-of-factly from an impossibly lush couch in his lofty office in Tribeca. Savvy Studio is Prieto’s multifaceted business, billed as “an ongoing dialogue between design, art, function, emotion, motion and mankind”. And then there’s his side hustle as a chocolatier: the 43-year-old is the founder of Casa Bosques Chocolate, a bean-to-bar line that sells in 150 shops and has had collaborations with everyone from Apartamento magazine to the food artist Laila Gohar, a good friend of his.
A photo of Gohar, by Roe Ethridge, sits above the kitchen in the studio, where there are also classic modern furniture pieces like Gerrit Rietveld chairs, artwork by friends and former lovers, and classical-influenced pieces, some of which he took from a neighbouring building, mid-demolishment.
Born and raised in Chihuahua, Mexico, Prieto followed a path that has taken him all over the world – from Montreal to Spain to San Diego – before he settled between New York and Mexico City, where he owns a guesthouse that he’ll expand this autumn to include a food program choreographed with Gohar. “I’ve always been attracted to a wide range of possibilities,” he says. From his eclectic studio, these take shape: brand identities and typefaces, wallpapers for design studio Wallpaper Projects, carpets with Christopher Farr Cloth and the lights he designed that were recently shown at Emma Scully Gallery on the Upper East Side. If variety is the spice of life, then consider Prieto red hot. “All these different things that you do, none of them you do perfectly. So it’s emotional to go through and experience each of them,” he says.
Rafael Prieto, creative director
Ryder Kramer, menswear maven
Having grown up in Johns Creek, a suburb of Atlanta, Ryder Kramer admits that she always “loved a more formal sense of dressing. I would always wear a button-up and a blazer.” (This was in secondary school.) “They say to dress the way that you want your day to go, which is nicely,” she says.
After going to university at the New School in New York, Kramer worked at Hungry Ghost, a West Village coffee shop – “I got fired because I left in the middle of the day. I needed a little nap” – but her style got her noticed by a creative director at J. Crew, who introduced her to the suitmakers J. Mueser on Christopher Street, where she has served in operations and client communications for the past four years. “They rep the American Neapolitan dream of tailoring,” Kramer, 26, says, alluding to J. Mueser’s softer shoulder and casual sophistication.
After closing time, she can be found culling from the salivating crowds at bar-restaurant spots like Jean’s, The Nines and Baz Luhrmann’s Monsieur, as well as Soma, a roving party she co-hosts with the DJ/producer Charlie Klarsfeld and curator Lolita Cros. So how does one get into these chic fetes? “My job is to curate the room, and it’s never anything personal,” she says. “If you’re fun and light-hearted and don’t treat me like I work for you, we’ll get on.” That said, she says aiming for hotspots isn’t always the best strategy. “I think the beauty about New York is the ability to bop around,” she says. “Find some DJs you really like – they’re constantly posting about their gigs – and that will push you to places you would never think of going.”
Ryder Kramer, menswear maven
Reilly Davidson, curator
“It starts with the writing,” Reilly Davidson says. The 27-year-old curator is talking about her projects – “Right now I’m working on a show about the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s essay Introduction to Metaphysics” – but she could also be referring to her budding career.
Raised in Seattle, she first wrote about art at 17, prompting a teacher to pull her aside and tell her she should consider doing it professionally. While attending Hunter College in New York, she fact-checked and wrote critic’s picks for Artforum, composed exhibition texts and curated her first shows before joining the collective Super Dutchess. She then spent a year directing an NYC gallery called Real Pain (now Harkawik), before moving on to Martos Gallery and Shoot the Lobster, all by the age of 23. “There was a lot of pressure and a lot of work, but it was the most formative and wonderful experience,” says Davidson, who learned about sales and how to run a gallery.
After the past three years directing the New York outpost of Clearing, where she displayed artists like Tomasz Kowalski, Davidson decided to go solo. “I have a couple of shows coming up in New York, a couple I’m talking about in Los Angeles and London is on the radar,” she says. This month she’s participating in curated by, a festival in Vienna where international curators work around a theme, this year’s being “fractured subjectivity”. Heavy stuff, but nothing Davidson can’t handle. “The text I wrote for the show is almost 2,000 words. I think it’s important to get the written word in there to contextualise,” she says. “It just gives you life rafts.”
Reilly Davidson, curator
Flynn McGarry, chef
While building his New York restaurants (beginning with Gem, which he opened in 2018, when he was 19, followed by Gem Wine and Gem Home), the chef Flynn McGarry fell in love with design. At Gem Home, a Scandi-feeling spot in NoLIta, a third of the space is dedicated to objects (ceramics, bowls, coffee mugs) that he acquired on his travels. “I used to buy all these antiques for myself and now we’re buying them to stock the store.” He’ll go to Paris and Copenhagen, where he trained at Geranium (he’s also worked at NYC’s Eleven Madison Park, Alinea in Chicago and Maaemo in Oslo), and fill up half a container before returning home to New York.
It’s in New York that he started, wunderkind-style, with pop-ups at 16, and it’s where he’ll open his next major project, Cove, in Hudson Square near SoHo, this autumn. “It’s a 40- seat à la carte room, a 34-seat tasting menu room and a 20-seat private dining room,” he says. The food will be inspired by his home state of California: it’ll be mostly vegetables, with flowers and herbs from Mama Farm, Isabella Rossellini’s regenerative agricultural endeavour in Long Island. “We’ll be able to get stuff that was picked that morning,” McGarry, now 27, says. And, of course, he’s been involved with every design decision underneath Cove’s 22-foot ceilings: “The floors are Dinesen, from Denmark. They’re in all the old castles, very thick Douglas fir that you can sand down forever.” The restaurant, two years in the making, is not just a reflection of his maturation as a chef, but of his taste: “We’re actually getting to the part where we’re piecing it together. I’m very confident in these decisions.”
Flynn McGarry, chef
Alice McNally, model
“I’m a single mum with two jobs,” says Alice McNally, 20. The kid? A cat named Charlie. The jobs? She works nine to five at a showroom, repping brands like Ottolinger and Jeffrey Campbell. “I do a lot of steaming,” she says. “I check everything in, I log it all, scheduling, email. It’s fun, though. I love it.” Job number two is modelling. McNally, daughter of the New York restaurateur Keith McNally, was signed in Hawaii, where she moved from London with her mum for much of secondary school before heading to Mexico for six months to spend time with a friend and graduate. At 18, she returned to New York, her birthplace, and signed with No Agency, nabbing gigs with Timberland, Skims and Eckhaus Latta, among other brands.
“Modelling is an outlet for expression. A lot of people are good at it,” she says. Not her? “I don’t worry,” she says. “But I would never say, ‘Oh, I’m a model.’” She doesn’t see herself as “put together” like other models, despite her unspoken gorgeousness, chicly thrifted outfit (almost all her clothes are vintage) and effortless cool to match her unplaceable British accent (her dad is from Bethnal Green). Not that it matters: modelling is how she makes money; the showroom job is fun; fashion is not the goal. Instead, what she wants is more furry children. Specifically alpacas.
“I want to open my own sanctuary upstate and work with animals,” she says. It sounds Edenic, but for now she has the career of a simmering young model to manage, as well as friends, family, steaming and returns – which isn’t to say that she isn’t getting started: “I’m gonna get another cat.”
Alice McNally, model
Taken from 10+ Issue 8 – FUTURE, JUBILEE, CELEBRATION – out now. Order your copy here.
TASTEMAKERS
Photographer RAFAEL MARTINEZ
Talent REILLY DAVIDSON, LOTUS L. KANG, YASMIN KAYTMAZ, RYDER KRAMER, FLYNN MCGARRY, ALICE MCNALLY, EBECHO MUSLIMOVA, RAFAEL PRIETO, ZOE GUSTAVIA ANNA WHALEN and CELESTE YIM
Text JOHN ORTVED
