Wiederhoeft Is Like a Drama Club for Fashion Freaks
It’s extremely hard to prove something doesn’t exist anymore. Jackson Wiederhoeft of the New York brand Wiederhoeft tells me this while we sit in their studio a week before their Spring/Summer 2025 show. In front of us are sugar cookies in the shape of poodles piped with sugary pink and white icing and a tiered wedding cake (it's faux). Behind us is a rack filled with over twenty white corsets dangling from hangers.
Lately, Wiederhoeft has become transfixed by the extinction reports that the government puts out annually. One in particular served as major inspiration for the most recent collection: “There's a bird that's been really inspirational for the show. It's called the Kauai Oo. It’s a small songbird. They used to live in Hawaii, and it was only declared extinct officially by the government last year, but the last time it was seen was 1985 and the last time it was heard was 1987,” they say. “The study of species is so interesting because it's really hard to prove something doesn't exist. It takes a long time.
The Kauai Oo has an extremely distinct song. It’s actually one of the only reasons scientists can confirm that the bird is officially extinct, Wiederhoeft says. “No one had eyes on it for two years. They could just hear it because it had such a distinctive song.” The bird they were listening to was the last of its kind, and the song was a mating call; it spent two full years flying around the island, looking for a partner who didn't exist. There was a gap in the duet because there was no one left to finish it.
“It’s like…a beautiful tragedy,” Wiederhoeft says. That is important to him because the brand is all about storytelling. “I can't even start really designing a collection until I know what the story is. My brain honestly works more as a costume designer. You can't design costumes if you don't know what the story is. Characters need a time, need a place. It's much more interesting for me to provide an emotion.”
New York was always the goal, which is how Wiederhoeft ended up at Parsons. They describe their career in design as a happy accident: “It was kinda not my choice. I started more in theater, and in high school I really got into drama club—I ran that shit. Against all the odds. Usually there's an actor or someone in the program who's the face of drama club. But it was me,” Wiederhoeft says.
When they moved to the city, they started interning on an off-Broadway show called Queen of the Night, for which Thom Browne was designing the costumes. Wiederhoeft worked alongside the costume designer who was helping transform Browne’s designs into things that could be worn on stage. For Wiederhoeft—who would go on to work for Browne before starting their own brand—the experience was a lesson in the ways fashion can create drama. Ultimately, he realized fashion was great because you get to be the director.
“I love the art form of costume design so much. But ultimately, you're always going to be following someone else's vision totally. And as a fashion designer, you have so much autonomy to build a world. I basically get to direct a little Broadway show every runway. Its casting, its scenery! And I really responded to that vision, and seeing Thom [Browne] do it helped me realize how you could do so much with fashion in terms of storytelling.”
While the brand has now only been around for half a decade—the spring 2025 show yesterday marked its five year anniversary—the Wiederhoeft runway has become one of the most highly anticipated events of the week because you never know what you’re going to get.
Last season, Wiederhoeft was inspired by the idea of a salon, so he created rows of seats that were meant to look like the floorplan of a townhouse, with a floor covered in smoke that swirled around the models' feet as they propelled themselves down the runway. The season before was titled “Night Terror at the Opera” and was held at the experimental theater La Mama, where the Spring 2024 collection was presented as a three-act runway with 19 dancers.
“If you're gonna round up everyone for 10 minutes and make them sit down and watch something, you might as well make something worth watching. You’re already putting so much work into the collection, so we might as well go the extra mile and put on a show,” he said. Like the Kauai Oo bird, fashion shows that feel like a performance have long been presumed extinct. Wiederhoeft is bringing them back.
Another thing Wiederhoeft is bringing back is corsets, a garment for which he has become known and considers as much of a core value as performance. “When you put on a corset, you see a new side of yourself, and you feel powerful. It's just a really exciting way to explore a new side of yourself and, with it, new emotions.”
He goes on to describe a corset manifesto he read that provides two approaches to thinking about the way it cinches your body. “One way to use it is to make yourself really skinny and you’re compressing the whole body. And another way is to manipulate the body to make the waist smaller or make the chest bigger. You’re manipulating.” The latter is more their approach. “I just really want everyone to feel like they can look excellent, they can just be beautiful. And there's no reason why everyone can’t be into corsets. Everyone deserves that feeling to become this powerful version of themselves. It’s not a costume, it’s an enhanced version of yourself.”
The Spring 2025 collection is also a debut for their new corset sizing program. “We have our core corset—the Wasp corset—now in 68 sizes. It's really a statement about inclusivity and the power of the corset as an object of body euphoria. It’s a more modern approach because there's a place for everyone.” This is a very important message of Wiederhoeft. “I just want to make sure that everyone feels like they can be a part of it—it's a drama club! Drama club is like a refuge for the freaks. A lot of people in the Wiederhoeft universe are certainly drama-club-adjacent.”
I wasn’t able to attend the Wiederhoeft show this season as I had to travel for two international weddings. One of them is my best friend's; she chose Weiderhoeft for two of her bridal looks. I woke up to a series of texts from other friends, some who work in fashion and some who do not, talking about the show and the world Weiderhoeft has created.
There was mention of long embellished pink opera gloves and a short silver mini dress, a mid-calf wasp skirt in wine-stained double faced silk satin dyed with Silver Oak's 2020 Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, and a shimmering pink embroidered dress worn with a matching bag with a rope-like strap twisted about the model’s arm. But the thing I noticed the most was the way everyone was talking about them: as pieces they could see themselves (or me) wearing.
Wiederhoeft’s world isn’t for the passive observer; it invites people in. Reading the messages, I’m reminded of one of the last things Wiederhoeft revealed to me, “Wiederhoeft is not too cool for school. That is something I care about. I want it to be there for everyone.”
And there will be no extinction report on it soon, that’s for sure. “I'm here for the long haul and I’ll die trying,” he continued before I left his studio. “I believe in this.” And so do I and everyone else who has ever taken a step into the Wiederhoeft World.
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