Daryl K: The Timeless Muse

The moment I heard Daryl Kerrigan had a pop-up retrospective of her work Upstate at Verse Work/Shop in Red Hook NY, memories stitched into my twenties in NYC rushed to the surface. Not nostalgia alone, but recognition — a name that once lived in the lining of my life, suddenly vivid again, like a beloved jacket rediscovered and, improbably, still the perfect fit.

Daryl K: I Am My Muse, the first exhibition celebrating fashion designer Daryl Kerrigan, opened on November 1 at Verse Work/Shop in Red Hook and ran for six weeks. At Verse, Daryl K’s clothes don’t whisper. The past doesn’t sit quietly behind glass — it moves, flickers, and breathes. Nearly fifty archival pieces hang from sculptural forms created by her husband and long-time creative partner, Paul Leonard — shapes built by hand to hold garments the way memory is actually held: mid-connection, mid-conversation, mid-stride. Sequins hang freely like celebratory confetti that simply refuse to fall, suspended instead like glints in a secret language spelled from leather and light. The clothes aren’t displayed; they’re alive in the room, gossiping across decades, unbothered by time, buoyed by motion.

“The exhibition brought myself and Paul back into another close and intensive collaboration, as in the early days of fashion shows and store design for Daryl K,” says Kerrigan. “It’s been so great. I love the forms, the way they move and feel alive. It’s wonderful to see the clothing displayed like this — no plastic static mannequins, no separation of time and space between them.”

“The exhibition brought myself and Paul back into another close and intensive collaboration, as in the early days of fashion shows and store design for Daryl K.” – Daryl Kerrigan

Her voice wasn’t just describing the work — it was reanimating it, restoring movement and mischief to the clothes. Verse itself feels like the ideal co-conspirator: a Hudson Valley gallery that treats fashion, art, and object as equals, giving Kerrigan’s pieces the kind of staging they’ve always deserved — less museum vitrine, more eternal party.  The Hudson Valley, she says, is not a stylistic contrast to Manhattan, but an accomplice to her creativity. Kerrigan’s second home in the Hudson Valley is her sanctuary, not a counterpoint to New York so much as its clever collaborator — the calm there sharpening the city’s electric tempo in her work, each location conspiring to keep her creative pulse steady, restless, and always forward. “I’m drawn to the balance between nature and the city. I work in fabric, paint, and words — in my Upstate studio, my New York studio, or on the road, sketchbook in hand.” She offers it not as a biography, but as an itinerary.

“I’m drawn to the balance between nature and the city. I work in fabric, paint, and words—in my upstate studio, my New York studio, or on the road, sketchbook in hand.” – Daryl Kerrigan

Downtown Manhattan formed the subtext of her cool long before cultural lexicons could claim it. She arrived in New York City in the 1980s from Dublin, carrying a cinematic eye sharpened on film sets that knew grit and character more than runways did. Before launching her own line, she was costuming women for screens steeped in subculture intuition, serving as wardrobe supervisor on the Oscar-winning film My Cousin Vinny and designing costumes for the indie classic Mystery Train by director Jim Jarmusch. In 1991, she and Paul opened their first shop on East 6th Street in Manhattan’s East Village—less store, more studio stage—where silhouettes were invented rather than merchandised, drawn from parking garages, club bathrooms, and empty pools where subculture was quietly writing its earliest drafts. Her destinations, including the later Bond Street store, became waypoints in the atlas of independent style. “I always designed from the street,” she told me — “the real street — the one powered by self-invention, not sanctioned trend.” The Council of Fashion Designers of America recognized that steady rebellion early, awarding her the CFDA Perry Ellis Award, but her cool was never the trophy — it was the thesis woven into her work itself: clothing cut to understand women, built for motion, instinct, attitude, appetite, and the unfiltered grammar of everyday life.

“I’ve always designed from the street—the real street—powered by self-invention, not sanctioned trend.” – Daryl Kerrigan

She also always designed for a woman already in motion — the city native, the studio dweller, the traveler with a sketchbook wedged beside her passport, who dresses for life, not approval. The women who wear her pieces have stories before outfits, opinions before trends, and wardrobes built on muscle memory, leather, good denim, bright evenings, late work nights, and early train mornings headed north. Then comes her north star — the line that grounds everything — delivered the way great style often is: direct, fearless, and impossible to misplace. As Daryl says, loud and clear, “style over fashion, always.”

“Style over fashion, always.” – Daryl Kerrigan

Curator Nina Stritzler-Levine—whose eye for interdisciplinary craft helped shape exhibitions at the Bard Graduate Center Gallery—chose Verse Gallery as the ideal stage for Daryl K’s world, where fashion, art, and objects exist on equal footing. In this airy Hudson Valley setting, distinctions fall away entirely. Guided by Stritzler-Levine’s curatorial hand, Daryl’s universe unfolds with ease: drawings, photographs, and those mythic runway films—shot atop Lever House, staged at Gagosian Gallery, or captured in an empty Lower East Side pool—appearing in effortless conversation with one another. Beneath it all, a new digital archive hums, carrying decades of intuition, grit, glamour, and motion.

What strikes you instantly is how alive everything looks. Not retro. Not referential. Alive. Kerrigan’s work never curdles into nostalgia — it keeps pace with the women who wear it now, the women who move through their lives in clothes that feel biographical, not borrowed. Her pieces dodge the timestamped cues of any single decade the same way their maker does — gleaming as though preserved in luxurious resin, not frozen in time, but luminous within it. The women who wear her designs aren’t following a moment, they’re living inside one, and that life force is the quiet magic of clothing made for motion, for individuality, for a real life insistently underway.

In the 90s, I met Daryl through her pants, which is to say, I met her properly. I saved four paychecks for her black stretch leather leggings — a minor fortune that changed the way I walked into the world. I wore them everywhere: the corridors of my beauty-director life, late dinners funded on restraint, the after-hours line at Nell’s, where style was social currency and individuality the only true password. The leather softened over time but never dated; it conformed to conviction, not the decade. It was the Hip Hugger Bootleg Jean that brought her notoriety, but the true masterpiece lived elsewhere—in the syntax beneath the seam: razor-sharp suits broken by a sly zipper or unexpected hardware; tees that appeared simple until you felt the tension; leather pieces that cling like second opinions you wish you’d had sooner. Her work resists timestamps because it was never built to represent women—it was built to understand them.

Her clothes avoid looking dated because she does too — effortlessly cool, beautifully energized, designing always for herself, a woman in eternal collaboration with her own instincts. “If I didn’t create my own clothing — what would I wear?!” she laughed when we spoke, rhetorical but rooted, not in self-regard, but self-reliance. Her taste was never borrowed from a trend cycle or handed down by a boardroom; it was earned on sidewalks, studio floors, train windows, and open country air. It just so happens — gloriously, improbably — that the things she makes for her own wardrobe are the precise pieces the rest of us covet, the silhouettes that feel newly invented even when they’re decades old. 

“If I didn’t create my own clothing—what would I wear?!” – Daryl Kerrigan

Because what Daryl builds for herself is cut from a deeper pattern: clothes designed to move, to accompany real life, to carry attitude without era, the kind of style that survives contact with the world without ever fraying into “retro.” The independent spirit of her work is the glue, yes — but it’s also the spark.

“Many women I have met throughout the years have special and momentous memories of times in their lives when they were wearing Daryl K,” she added. “This is always a powerful emotional communication, and it’s a pleasure to be part of their lives in this way.

“Others unfamiliar with the brand are taken aback when they see how the clothing of today is so closely reflected in these designs from the 90s. Daryl K’s legacy is remembered in real-life stories and continues to do so today.”

“Many women I have met throughout the years have special and momentous memories of times in their lives when they were wearing Daryl K.” – Daryl Kerrigan

Seeing her designs floating in space—some old friends, some new wonders—felt less like reporting and more like remembering something I didn’t realize I’d memorized with my own gait. The clothes never broke stride. She never broke syntax. And there, inside her world suspended in Red Hook—this perfect, Verse-produced, Daryl-made alchemy of downtown grit and Hudson Valley calm—I fell for her all over again, gently tapping back into an era that, thanks to her, never agreed to end.

Kerrigan sums it up best—her own words, her own compass, delivered without tremor or theatrics:

“Creation defeats destruction.”

Not a battle cry, but a steady orientation—stitched, denim-lined, leather-bound, always pointing forward, always in motion.

And if inspiration strikes—or reinvention calls—you can find her ever-current, perpetually cool collections on her website, where the muse never clocks out, the seams never concede to trend, and every piece feels like a remembered confidence, sharpened for now. No archive required.

Photos courtesy of Daryl Kerrigan

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