“What Halston was for the Studio 54 era we want our brand to be for this post-Covid downtown NYC scene”

The post Covid landscape of New York has seen a mini-revival of sorts in the downtown creative scene. Known (sometimes derogatorily, sometimes not) by a number of names including the Indie Sleaze revival or the Dimes Square scene, the city has nonetheless seen a rebirth of the kind of independent culture that was long bemoaned to have died out years ago. This loosely structured and by no means ideologically coherent “scene” includes upstart, genre-blurring musicians like The Dare, Blaketheman1000, Frost Children, and May Rio. It’s featured a rebirth of indie media to document it all with a print revival in publications like DirtyMag, Sex Magazine, The Drunken Canal, Forever Magazine, alongside newsletters and Substack scribes like the NY Times-featured Perfectly Imperfect and Joe Kerwin’s You Missed it, not to mention podcasts like The Adam Friedland Show, Throwing Fits, and Neoliberal Hell, as well as photographers to capture it all like Mark Hunter aka The Cobrasnake, Matt Weinberger, and Caroline Safran. Where, amongst this mini-renaissance, is the defining clothing brand to capture this era you may ask? That’s where Drink.More.Water is hoping to come in. 

“With all this amazing creative energy, it feels like there’s a void in terms of a clothing brand to really capture the moment and define the scene, which is what we’re trying to do. I’m not saying we’ve done that yet, I’m certainly not claiming to represent any group or genre just yet, but hopefully years from now people will talk about our brand and the post-Covid “Roaring 20s” indie scene in the same vein of Halston and the Studio 54 era.” said Drink.More.Water founder and designer Young Warhol.

Drink.More.Water is a NYC-based art platform, clothing brand, and magazine, founded in 2018 by the aforementioned “Young Warhol”, the creative moniker of Serge Neborak, a mid/late 20s New York native. The brand describes itself as small-scale with a focus on cultivating an organic community through top-down collections that follow a unifying theme and narrative, conveyed via multiple mediums including clothing, short films, writing, and other visual art. They boast stockists at fledgling downtown hotspots Retail Pharmacy and Bowery Showroom and have so far released four collections, the most recent of which is titled “For You, The World…” and is available to purchase via the aforementioned stockists as well as the brand’s webstore. 

The brand can be described as a cross between streetwear and tailoring with a heavy emphasis on prints. Each collection is told through the lens of a story, with every design choice serving a clear purpose within the overarching narrative as a form of world-building, from the artworks that make up the fabric prints to the words and phrases that adorn the garments via printing and embroidery. While clothing is the central medium in the brand, each season’s projects extend much further: a magazine accompanies each collection, inviting collaborations from local and non-local artists to offer their take on the season’s theme. The most recent season, a love story couched in the visual style and raw emotion of J.M.W. Turner and the Impressionist movement saw multimedia offerings by several of the brand’s frequent collaborators such as Maya Feero, Helen Jacobs, and Sarai. The third season, “Welcome To Fear City” a horror story, took the concept one step further and displayed the narrative in a short film, using that season’s collection as the film’s costumes, an effort that netted the brand a win for “Best Costume Design” at the LA-based IndieX Film Festival. “We were proud of that one,” said Neborak. “As a clothing brand first and foremost we weren’t about to let anyone else beat us out for costume design,” he said with a laugh.

Building an organic community around the brand has been at the heart of Drink. More. Water since its inception, counting the loyal, grassroots followings of more established local NYC brands like Aime Leon Dore and Telfar as examples to aspire to. This is essential post-Covid, as the world experienced isolation at its worst phase. To fulfill this vision, organizing and throwing live, in-person events has been a central tenet to the brand’s ethos since the beginning, like the annual runway show to showcase the collection every season. It started in a small gallery in LES, gradually expanding to a big industrial warehouse in Brooklyn during the last 2 seasons. While social media will always be a factor (let’s face it, it’d be more or less impossible to try to run a business without it in 2022) and the Dimes Square scene at large has often been described as “overly online”, the brand believes that nothing beats connecting with people face to face, bringing people together to share in a fun night of music, art, and community. In addition to their own events, the brand styles local scenesters at a torrid pace, with garments popping up on some of the hottest emerging artists in the downtown scene like Blaketheman1000, May Rio, Shallow Halo, Jean-Luc aka NYC Clout Guy, Wu-Tang: An American Saga’s TJ Atoms, Manchado, and more.

And that’s not even mentioning New York’s rich history when it comes to the apparel industry. Just a few decades ago, the less than 1 square mile neighborhood known as the Garment District produced about 90% of the clothes sold in the US. That, like domestic manufacturing in virtually every sector, has of course been completely hollowed out by decades of offshoring, but there’s still a vibrant business network to draw on. Being 100% made-in-NYC has been central to the brand's ethos since day 1. 

In an era when “sustainability” has been rendered a meaningless greenwashing term, with planet-destroying fast fashion behemoths claiming their sweatshop-produced garbage is somehow “sustainable”, a new wave of smaller scale, degrowth-focused brands have emerged as an alternative, Drink.More.Water being one of them. The brand believes that instead of some fanciful technocratic tweak in production, the only true path to real sustainability lies in locally producing smaller batches of well-made products made by people paid a living wage. 

In addition to the stockists listed above, the brand has found itselves on the racks of notable independent boutiques like Flying Solo, Fireplace 409, and doors.NYC. They hope to expand slowly, to select retailers that share their vision of small-scale independent art, first to other US cities with their own bubbling fashion scenes like LA and Chicago, and after, hopefully, to the rest of the world. Their work has been featured in editorials of renowned publications like Ladygunn, DirtyMag, Off The Rails, i-D, Coco and Breezy’s fall campaign, and also in the ad campaign of a major sandal brand. 

Says Neborak on the future of the brand: “Our goals coincide with our hopes for society and the creative community at large. We’re really hoping that it’ll once again be possible to make a career as an independent artist, whether that’s music, clothing, writing, whatever. It’s a little corny to say out loud, but art is so vital for society, and if it’s impossible for all but a select few to make a living doing it then no one will be making it. Not every artist wants to be Drake and not every brand wants to be Balenciaga, a lot just want to make a living doing what they love. We hope Drink.More.Water will be a part of that world should it happen, but it’s a future we’d like to live in regardless of what happens with our brand.”