My New York Story: Darren Greenblatt

MY NEW YORK STORY

DARREN GREENBLATT: FROM RUNWAY TO CANVAS

By Bailey Beckett e produced one of New York Fashion Week’s biggest shows. Debuted his handbag collection in Vogue. Designed clothes, jewelry, and accessories. Authored books. Even opened a bakery.

Fast forward to 2021: Now, fashion veteran Darren Greenblatt is channeling his creativity in a whole new medium: mixed media art. Combining paints, French acrylics, Hermes and Gucci wallpapers, and vintage magazines, the critically acclaimed designer and producer, has created a 20-piece series. It evokes his love/hate relationship with the industry, bringing to the canvas a visual dialogue that confronts fashion’s waste and pretension with its artistry, beauty, and relevance.

COLOR THE WORLD

The result is a collection bursting with color, nostalgia, and contradiction. “As a fashion refugee with distance from the industry, and from the craft that has been a driving force since I was a child, I’m able to explore and see things with new eyes,” says Greenblatt. “My recent work homages the enigmatic and magical world of fashion—past, present, and future—and how it works within different spaces and mediums.”

Greenblatt found inspiration in a wealth of materials, from flowers to graphic design, layered patterns, prints, and textures. His use of color is exaggerated, brimming with hope and fury. How those elements relate to conflict gave the artist the tension to capture his message. “There is friction between the duality of organic nature and two-dimensional graphic design, where flowers become repeated prints,” he says. Rather than label the collection, Greenblatt, in an ode to the fashion industry, numbered each piece—like the looks/exits from a runway presentation.

Greenblatt’s career trajectory has taken many routes. A graduate of the Fashion Institute of Technology, he studied with designer Betsey Johnson and couturier Christian Francis Roth before founding his first multi-media platform, Girls Rule. It was the first group show during Fashion Week catering to the youth market. It created a new runway for emerging designers to show their collections, sponsors to enter the industry, and up-and-coming models, actresses, and socialites to take the world stage. Girls Rule ruled New York Fashion Week for a decade.

At the same time, Greenblatt became a creative director for iconic fashion brand Fiorucci before starting his label Stanton Maxwell and designed his designer handbag collection first shown in Vogue’s 2008 September issue. Greenblatt also began an illustration series called The Ugly Lives of Beautiful People, featuring sketches of runway collections with pithy, ironic quotes about life, culture, fashion industry, and co-authored illustrated Planet Yumthing, a DIY book series for teens. Greenblatt’s growing profile in the fashion world put him on the radar with producers of the reality show The Apprentice. He was cast as a guest fashion designer and assigned to a team of young women challenged to design a mini-collection of women’s clothes, sold to Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Bloomingdales.

They won, naturally. At the victory party, a certain former President approached Greenblatt with, “You could be the next Calvin Klein because of me.” Greenblatt contends that making someone the next Calvin Klein would take more than getting five New York City stores to carry the collection from one episode, no matter the ratings. “I had paid my dues for years. That’s the life of an entrepreneur.”

ENTERTAINING WAYS

The 2009 recession encouraged Greenblatt to expand his creative palate to a new medium: food. His passion for cooking, entertaining, and experience design, coupled with the entrepreneurial instincts, led him to start Donna Bell’s Bake Shop with two friends, first as a mobile food truck and later as a brick-and-mortar shop in midtown Manhattan. Its success spawned a best-selling cookbook, Donna Bell’s Bake Shop: Recipes and Stories of Family, Friends and Food. After more than two decades in New York, where he established himself a creative and entrepreneurial force in the fashion industry, he put his career on hold for personal reasons. He also stopped drawing, sketching, and painting. Though not ready to share more about his life at that time, he says, “bad experiences may serve as inspiration for other artists, but it was never what drove me to create. So, it was hard to find the light and color that always guided my work during that time.”

Eventually, the fog began to lift, and Greenblatt thought of a new series, one that would bring color to his life again. And then the pandemic hit, giving his project new urgency. “It’s what I needed, and I think what the world needed,” Greenblatt says.