BLANK is a New York women’s collection designed by Youngji Cho, and it does one thing. It takes traditional workwear, military apparel, and uniforms and rebuilds them as womenswear. That is the entire brief, and the label has never claimed more than it.
BLANK is a Nepenthes line. Nepenthes is the New York company behind Engineered Garments, and Cho works inside it, contributing to Engineered Garments collections and leading the design of its womenswear line tActi. She trained at Parsons and began inside Engineered Garments itself. Her own account of her practice puts the weight on “garment construction, material development, and production,” in that order, which is a designer telling you where she thinks a garment is decided.
The name is a statement of position. Cho has described the project as a blank slate, still early, with the label left blank to say so. The first work went back to United States Army and Navy uniforms of the 1950s and read them closely. There is no founding myth attached to any of this, no mill, no house archive, and the page would be worse for inventing one. What there is instead is a designer with a narrow and specific interest, and garments that pursue it without wandering.
BLANK at W Department
The BLANK pieces at W Department are womenswear, made in the United States.
The Monkey Skirt is the cargo shape, two large pockets at the sides and one at the back, finished with a deep vent at the center back, and it comes in cotton corduroy in Acorn and in cotton ripstop in Olive. The Cropped BDU Jacket is a battle-dress jacket taken up to the waist, in cotton ripstop, Olive, with a four-button front and two flap pockets. The Lace Up Skirt is a lightweight Blackwatch plaid in polyester, with a deep center vent and a lacing across the back. The Arthur Pants are wide-leg worsted wool gabardine, Charcoal, loose overall, with two pleats on each thigh.
Read together they make a single argument, and it is a good one. Keep the pocket placement, the cloth weight, and the fastenings that made a working garment work. Change the proportion until it is a woman’s. Nothing is softened to get there, which is why these read as clothing rather than as costume.
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- All BLANK
- Engineered Garments
- Skirts at W Department
- Trousers at W Department
- Coats and Jackets at W Department
- Womenswear at W Department
- Getting Dressed as a Creative Act
- The Fabric Care Guide
- The Library
- Visit W Department
Shop BLANK
Uniform and workwear, redrawn for women, made in the United States.