From Chinatown galleries to Broadway’s footlights, these five tastemakers from New York are bending the rules in fashion, photography and performance. Each man in our portfolio is making moves, not just in their individual expressions but in the culture they’re increasingly shaping. In 2025, these are the fellas worth following.
Tom Francis, actor
Tom Francis has many talents, but one might stand out. “I can milk a cow,” he says. The 25-year-old actor – who won an Olivier last year for his performance as Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd. in London and took up that role on Broadway in the autumn – grew up on farms in rural Suffolk. His background might explain his open approach to new projects. “I just want to work with fun people who make the job interesting and have big ideas,” he says. Francis also has a relaxed approach to style. “My thing is weathered jackets,” he says, though he keeps his eye on baggier items from Acne Studios, Thom Browne and Thom Sweeney. Emerging from the ArtsEd performing arts school in West London, Francis booked the role of Romeo in the West End production of & Juliet before deciding he needed a serious break – maybe a permanent one – from musical theatre. Then along came director Jamie Lloyd, who was on a list of Francis’s dream collaborators. Soon enough, he found himself in Sunset Blvd., with eyes on Hollywood and more. Next, he’s starring alongside Adam Sandler, George Clooney and Greta Gerwig in Noah Baumbach’s new Netflix film, Jay Kelly. And he’s working on music. “I’m hoping to release an album,” he says. “Anthemic stuff.” His ambitions are impressive, vaulting towards renaissance men like Donald Glover as models. “I think he’s such an inspiration, a multifaceted performer, creator and artist,” says Francis. What’s his guiding light for keeping it all in perspective and himself grounded? “My main thing is don’t be a dick,” he says. “It’s the way to do business.”
Tom Francis
Quil Lemons, photographer
When you look at Quil Lemons or at a Quil Lemons, the challenge is knowing who you see. “I think there are many versions of me. And that’s why playing with a self-portrait is fun,” he says. The 27-year-old photographer, born and raised in Philadelphia, now based in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, has emerged as a singular voice exploring Black and queer identity through his portraiture that is, at once, intimate, explicit and tender (“Quil Lemons Wants to Be the Robert Mapplethorpe of His Community,” read a 2023 headline in The New York Times). “I love being subversive in all the spaces that I’m playing in,” he says. For all of his carefree notions, he’s quick to point out the challenges as well. “It’s the same struggle as with any other Black man in this country – just going against the grain, but also just not letting that weigh on me or the freeness of the work.” Lemons dove into those issues in Quiladelphia, his 2023 solo show at the Hannah Traore Gallery in New York, but has also brought his provocative eye to editorial and commercial work for The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Moncler and Valentino. He shoots only on film – “unless there’s a gun in my back” – flying in the face of digital convenience. “Some things take longer to understand. With digital, the immediacy of everything is just too much,” he says. This summer, he’ll bring his work to arts organisation Twenty Summers in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for a group show entitled American Faggot Party. For now, he’s reading Carter G. Woodson, Gary Indiana and Hilton Als, and contemplating what his own work means at this moment. “After the election results, everyone has become a little bit more radical about coming together,” he says. “The only way we can protect ourselves is by doing so.”
Quil Lemons
Jontay Kahm, designer
Jontay Kahm doesn’t like to sketch his ideas. “It’s all about texture,” says the 29-year-old Plains Cree designer and Parsons School of Design grad student. The pieces he builds, which blend his culture and elements of traditional regalia with sculptural fashion aesthetics, “are not necessarily clothes. They’re like art pieces,” he says. Kahm, who hails from the Mosquito, Grizzly Bear’s Head, Lean Man First Nation in Saskatchewan, Canada, says the pull to fashion first came as a boy, when he witnessed the look and sound of Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance video. After studying fashion design at Marist College in upstate New York and studio arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, he presented his BFA collection at the city’s Indian Market in 2023, which caused more than a few heads to turn, including that of Gaga collaborator Nicola Formichetti. “He came into my DMs on Instagram. I was just smiling. It was a full-circle moment,” Kahm says. Parsons came calling and one of his pieces, a sculptural top adorned with duck feathers, was worn by Lily Gladstone during her Oscar campaign for Killers of the Flower Moon. His work, creations that are at once otherworldly and deeply tied to the land (you can recognise elements of animal hybridity, organic shapes and playfulness), subsume his own culture as well as contemporary art. “I’ve always been inspired by Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. They’re like ecstasy to the eyes,” he says. He’s busily preparing for the next Indian Market in August and his Parsons thesis show, laying foundations for his dream: to become a creative director at an established fashion house. “I would love to have a team behind me, because I can’t do it all alone forever.”
Jontay Kahm
Anthony Roth Costanzo, opera virtuoso
To infer that Anthony Roth Costanzo is just an ‘opera singer’ doesn’t do him justice. Beginning at age 11, the 42-year-old countertenor has produced a wide variation of work in theme and scope, from singing backup for Michael Jackson as a child and baroque operas with the New York Philharmonic to appearing with Philip Glass at the Met. Last year, that diversity reached new heights when Costanzo was hired to lead the renowned Opera Philadelphia (he lives between there and New York). “I’m excited about the potential of opera bringing people together in a time when we’re really isolated and divided,” he says. He’s also working on a project that will be a book and an album, Countertenor. “You know, opera is fundamentally an interdisciplinary art form. It’s where ballet began,” he says. His inspirations are, naturally, just as wide-ranging: from the Ballets Russes to the jazz singer Cécile McLorin Salvant. For his style inspiration, he says, “I’m always in search of an intergalactic urban elegance.” This translates to a wardrobe containing Comme des Garçons and Issey Miyake – and, for Costanzo’s cabaret show with Justin Vivian Bond, Only an Octave Apart, costumes designed by his long-time friend Jonathan Anderson. Bond is also a close friend. “She has the ultimate desirable asset for a performer – freedom. That freedom is infectious.” So how does Costanzo find his freedom? “I have so many administrative responsibilities, so the times I feel the most free are when I’m on stage singing,” he says. “That, and biking way too fast through New York.”
Anthony Roth Costanzo
Arsun Sorrenti, musician
During high school, when New York kids are usually playing football, interning or faking their way into bars, Arsun Sorrenti had a different hobby. “I’ve been collecting audio equipment since I was 16,” he says. While the producing world looks to crate-diggers like Mark Ronson to find hidden sounds, Sorrenti, 26, is a live version, seeing potential in the oldest pedals. He doesn’t sit on them either; his treasured pieces of old tech make their way into songs, their delight-fully outmoded pitches and jangles striding the sonic blast in his 2024 debut album Babe I Hear Thunder in Your Heart and in the new music he has been releasing since then. “Fifties and Sixties music is the backbone of what I know,” he says. He listens to classic rock, yes, but also classical music, hip hop, jazz, folk and sources so varied they can be surprising: Appalachian music and sea shanties have considerable impact. The tracks were different and profound enough to catch the attention of Cat Power while Sorrenti, who performs as Arsun, was still in high school. She asked him to open for her in Europe, Australia, the US, everywhere. “I went from playing in practice rooms to playing in front of 1,000 people and continued to tour with her for years,” he says. Currently, he’s perfecting his next song – “It’s got a bit of a jazzy nature to it, like a Julie London record” – and this spring is part of the line-ups at Luck Reunion, a music festival held at Willie Nelson’s ranch in Texas, and SXSW in Austin. And he’s obsessing over his latest toy. “I have an EMT 140 Plate Reverberator, a huge metal plate enclosed in a wooden box. It vibrates and comes back as this echo chamber sound,” he says. “It’s like half the width of a car. I just love this reverb.”
Arsun Sorrenti
