Parishae Adnan's Second Skin Closes NYFW: Sustainable Couture Made From Archival Fabric

Pakistani couturier Parishae Adnan closed Flying Solo's New York Fashion Week show this week with Second Skin, an eight-look collection built almost entirely from garments that had already lived a previous life: archival menswear, bridalwear pulled from the house's own history, and deadstock fabric left over from earlier seasons, all dismantled and reconstructed around the female body through tailoring, corsetry and hand embroidery.

The collection moves in one deliberate arc. It opens with the rigid codes of traditional menswear, strong shoulders, precise tailoring, and a tie, and pushes steadily toward corsetry, exposed construction and exaggerated volume before closing on a look built almost entirely from sweeping tulle. Nothing here is a straightforward revival. A menswear waistcoat that appeared on a runway in December 2024 is pulled inward to fit a female torso, with its darts and pleats forced outward into visible ridges rather than hidden in the lining, so that the garment's construction becomes the design rather than something concealed by it.

There is a personal thread running underneath the craft story. Look one, titled My Father's Tie, is built around a hand-embroidered raw-silk tie originally created for a 2001 collection by Adnan's father, the designer Amir Adnan, whose work has defined Pakistani formalwear for more than three decades. The tie is worn now on a jacket cut into a severe, exaggerated hourglass, a masculine object carried across two decades into a silhouette it was never made for. Elsewhere in the collection, the same instinct is applied to material rather than memory: a bridal lehenga from an earlier bridal presentation is recut into a sculpted bustier and a sixteen-inch mini skirt, and an unsold sherwani, left in the house's dead stock for more than fifteen years, becomes a cropped suede jacket whose gold-embroidered collar and belt alone are said to represent roughly 200 hours of handwork.

The collection's final gesture is its most literal transformation. A traditional South Asian pishwas, shown on the runway in December 2024 alongside the menswear waistcoat behind look four, is dismantled entirely for the closing look, its densely embroidered black velvet recut into a floor-length Western fall coat. The original silhouette disappears completely; only the embroidery survives into its second form.

The presentation drew a notable crowd from New York's creative circles, including Grammy Award-winning musician Arooj Aftab, artist and influencer Sufi, and actor Anika Zulfikar. For a collection built on the idea that a garment's labor can outlast its original purpose, closing a fashion week show to that room made the point plainly: the craft in these pieces was never tied to the life they were first made for.