ABOUT US
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Welcome to Claude Russell NYC, LLC., your number one source for all things fashion. We're dedicated to giving you the very best of clothing, with a focus on luxury, gender-neutrality, and sustainability.
Claude Russell NYC, LLC is a Brooklyn-based athleisure brand, offering uniquely designed clothing from seasonal capsule collections aimed at providing clients with comfortable and fashionable pieces fit for any type of body. We are driven by a philosophy that tailor-made clothing must not only represent a designer’s vision but also incorporate the client’s personality and taste.
Although we offer ready-made products, including essentials and accessories, as well as some bigger pieces such as jackets, pants, and other tops and bottoms, we also design personal and stylized looks, especially for drag and ballroom performers. From complete costumes to designs imitating everyday apparel, the ingenuity of the New York ballroom scene shows up in our work through bold patterns, colors, and out-of-the-box finishes that will make any panel of judges gasps in awe.
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In its approach to fashion, Claude Russell NYC combines a modern idea of gender neutrality with traditional Afro-Caribbean ideas of sustainability, highly inspired by Native American philosophies. As a business based on the land of the Lenape in what is today known as New York City, we are not only interested in serving a certain clientele but to also acknowledging and putting into practice the values of people who came before us.
In this spirit, we thrive on using all of our fabrics, including what other workshops may be called scraps, to create both full pieces of clothing and smaller accessories. We utilize Ankara fabrics to underline the importance of African presence in North America, to pay homage to our ancestry while designing a future for our diaspora, and to promote highly stylized and diverse abstract patterns as a counterforce to the monotone and uniformness of fast fashion.
In our tailor-made offer, we seek to not only explore deep relationships with our clients but to also voice our opposition to an industry rooted in ignorance of bodily diversity, promotion of only certain kinds of body types, and strict boundaries between what is considered masculine or feminine. We offer the experience of comfort in one’s skin rather than conformity to industry standards.
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We see an opportunity in bringing forward colorful fabrics and patterns paired with designs that oppose shapelessness as the only statement of neutrality. By incorporating fluidity into our pieces, we showcase gender expectations and by extension fashion as a concept, as a phenomenon in constant motion, subjected to uninterrupted change. We believe that this approach mirrors today’s Gen Z and young Millennial attitudes towards society and its norms in general who are teaching not only their peers but also elders about the importance of underlining one’s individuality without access to a community.
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