In a bright warehouse in the East Side’s Grider neighborhood, TJ Precil scanned the 600-person crowd from his perch against a concrete wall. The crowd − young, stylish, racially diverse − mingled before Buffalo Fashion Week’s recent spring show. In bold marquee letters pasted on the wall was a message: CANT KEEP BUFFALO FASHION WEEK A SECRET.
Chuka Ibe, wearing a Mabdez Logo shirt and six-pocket denim jeans from Mabdez Media by Nathaly Delacruz, walks in Buffalo Fashion Runway’s second annual Black Carpet Show in February at the Connecticut Street Armory.
Precil’s silhouette was a series of cascading columns, beginning with his hair falling down his back in long dreadlocks and continued by a black, knee-length jacket printed with geometric shapes in shades of pink and orange. His black, wide-leg pants grazed the floor.
Everything about his appearance was intentional. Fashion is serious to Precil, a local model and artist who helped organize the event. Fashion, to him, isn’t a piece of fabric. Fashion is language. It’s a beacon for finding like-minded friends and collaborators.
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“This, right here, is a canvas,” Precil said, pointing to his outfit. “I’m able to portray a message that another person can appreciate.”
Precil is part of a growing Buffalo subculture that takes fashion seriously in a city that has struggled to form a fashion identity. The media outlet Vice once took advantage of a website ranking Buffalo as the country’s “least fashionable city” to investigate the question: “Do People Really Dress Like [expletive] in Buffalo?“
Buffalo’s poverty rate is more than double the national average, so it’s no surprise there isn’t a Fifth Avenue or Rodeo Drive here. Fashion in Buffalo doesn’t look like a Hermes bag that costs as much as a car. It looks like local artists, most of whom don’t come from money, wanting one of those bags enough to learn how to sew one themselves. They put their own spin on their creation and sell it to their friends.
The fashion scene in Buffalo is more about creativity and community − not status.
But the Buffalo fashion scene is also not just about creating an “art project,” said Caine McDermott, a local fashion designer and co-founder of Buffalo Fashion Runway. Local designers are turning fashion into full-time jobs − or trying to. They are carving out an industry by throwing runway shows here, and teaching each other how to sew. They are wearing other local brands and making institutional connections to bring more money and resources to a burgeoning local scene. Fashion is storytelling and hometown pride.
“It might be underground,” McDermott said. “But there’s a lot of talent.”
From left, David Wiggins, Venaisa Beckford and Del Brodowski cut materials for their work in a “design-a-thon” sponsored by New Era Cap at SUNY Buffalo State University in Buffalo, March 15, 2025.
The local fashion scene isn’t cutthroat, nor a very large slice of the global fashion industry’s trillion-dollar pie. Most designers are uninterested in contributing to the fashion industry’s waste and consumerism, said many of the dozens of people interviewed for this story who are on the leading edge of Buffalo’s homegrown fashion scene.
“They want to be able to create their own systems,” said Erin Habes, a lecturer at SUNY Buffalo State University’s Fashion and Textile Department. “The fashion industry is very toxic. They don’t want to contribute to the toxicity of it.”
Hours before showtime, a handful of people watch the runway rehearsal for Buffalo Fashion Week’s “Disruption” show at 612 Northland Ave. in Buffalo on May 3.
Is Buffalo fashion a secret? For some, yes. But “if you look for it, you’ll find it,” said Rashaad Holley, a designer and lecturer in the fashion department at Buffalo State.
“We’re still just a bunch of kids trying to make this thing work,” Precil said. “But more and more people who know what they’re doing, in a cultural sense, in a business sense, in a political sense, will catch wind, and just like the big cities, [will] create structures that give artists a chance to really fly. I feel like a place like Buffalo is primed for that.”
What is Buffalo fashion?
From the living room of his East Side apartment, Dame Powell sews each of his bags by hand. With their smooth leather, gold hardware and sharp lines, his bags do not, at least to the untrained eye, look handmade.
Luxury leather goods designer Dame Powell leans back for a moment, taking a break at his sewing machine, working to complete an order for Garrett Leather at his workshop in Buffalo.
He sells his Dame bags, as they are called by people who either own or want to own one, for at least $260, and up to $5,000, to clients throughout the country. Some people order custom bags and fly Powell out for hand delivery. “People want to buy a story,” he said.
Powell has a compelling story. He went from homelessness to outfitting NBA players and R&B artists with his hand-sewn, ketchup-red utilitarian jackets only a couple of years after buying a sewing machine. He then taught himself the art of leather design. His brand has been a full-time job for the past six years, but he’s sacrificed a lot − time, his living room and attending a couple of friends’ weddings.
His bestseller, the Regatta, is a leather, irregular hexagon that lies on its side. It looks as if it’s cocking its head to understand what you just said.
The Regatta, Dame Powell’s bestselling bag, is a leather irregular hexagon that lies on its side.
“Everybody knows what this is,” Powell said, holding the Regatta above his work table, “if you attend any of the fashion shows here.”
Once you start speaking the language of local fashion, then you see the characters everywhere.
An electric blue ball cap printed with the word “Cafe,” in rainbow letters is the creative expression of East Side-born-and-raised Chase Cobbina. He likes to imagine his hats connecting all of their wearers in a kind of metaphorical cafe.
The color-blocked jacket printed with the phrase “By A Guy“ in script was designed by Buffalo State grad Austin Guyett, from his Theatre District studio. The shiny kimono on sale at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum was sewn by another Buffalo State grad, Ashton Warner, on Niagara Street. In the back of Elmwood Village boutique Little Salmon, owner Tracey Wei sells her designs, such as a silky halter top with swirls that resemble the terraced rice fields along the mountains of her Chinese hometown.
Ashton Warner, designer of clothing brand ARW, describes a shirt made with block print fabric from fabric designer Emily Timon.
But Buffalo fashion often reflects Buffalo culture. It’s sports and music. It’s working class. Streetwear meets “grandpa’s closet.” It’s one-of-a-kind pieces sewn from cheap secondhand clothing. It’s a pair of 3D-printed golden hands fashioned into a bra by a University at Buffalo aerospace engineering grad. And it’s New Era’s internationally famous 59Fifty hat − sometimes embroidered with the logos of other, much smaller, local fashion brands.
“They want it to be the hardworking people. That is the undertone to every style in Buffalo … They want to see people with dirt under their nails,” said runner and former Olympian Fawn Dorr, an Akron native who works with Buffalo Fashion Week. “We don’t care about your Fashion Nova, your Shein stuff that’s just contributing to landfills. We want to know who made that and did they stitch it by hand?”
In designer Richie Hunter’s Elmwood Village studio, tattered, plastic objects line the ledge of the steel ceiling beam. A broken fork. A battered comb. Each of them must be black, must be plastic and must have been run over by a car and left along the side of the road.
“My goal is to collect something nobody else will,” Hunter said. (One of his worst fears? Running into someone wearing the same sneakers.)
Hunter grew up in Amherst, studied leather design at Savannah College of Art and Design, then moved to Brooklyn. When he returned to Buffalo, he “toned down” his style, removed the top hat that he had been wearing most days, and had “quite low expectations” for fashion.
“I didn’t know there was a fashion scene in Buffalo,” Hunter said.
He makes one-off pieces − Willy Wonka-like top hats and caps sewn from blankets then wrapped in rope − for people in Buffalo who want to stand out (and maybe share his shoe fear). Newell Nussbaumer, founder of media organization Buffalo Rising and Hunter’s landlord, is his biggest cheerleader.
“Our goal is to put a Richie Hunter hat on everybody’s head. I wore his baseball cap last night to Southern Junction,” Nussbaumer said. “There was a guy at the bar who was looking at me like I had a duck on my head. It didn’t bother me.”
Why now?
Not many people speak the language of Buffalo fashion, but more are learning.
Fashion bubbled up in Buffalo during the pandemic. There has always been a niche community of local designers and seamstresses, but suddenly it was cool, and even popular, to sew.
TikTok brought fashion from the streets of New York to the hands of local youth, teaching them to turn outdated, thrifted clothing into something new.
The trend coincided with another shift. Fashion students, who used to count the days until they could move to Manhattan and start their careers, decided to stay in Buffalo.
“I saw this shift, where like, ‘Oh my God, what do you mean you want to stay here?’ ” said fashion lecturer Habes. “They see the value of a small community, that they can be seen, they can contribute, where that would be hard to do what they’re doing in New York.”
Once the pandemic receded, fashion shows exploded in Buffalo like cherry blossoms blooming after a long winter.
The first shows came from plugged-in people who wanted to showcase the new wave of design talent.
After hearing the same refrain from the local designers he interviewed for Buffalo Rising − “There’s nothing here for us” − Nussbaumer cofounded a runway show, FIG, in 2023.
“We blew peoples’ minds that first show,” Nussbaumer said. “People were literally shocked that these designers all lived in the City of Buffalo.”
Five young artists formed a second group, Buffalo Fashion Runway, and held their first show in 2023. Soon followed another group, Buffalo Fashion Week, and another, UB Blueprint. They were all following in the footsteps of Buffalo State’s annual Runway show, which Habes founded in 2008.
Before Covid, there were one or two annual fashion shows in Buffalo for local designers. Now, there’s a full fashion calendar with new events each month.
“There’s mad fashion shows here,” said Cafe designer Cobbina. “The fact that people are getting fashion show fatigue shows people are doing something. When has there ever been this many events for you to say, ‘You know what? I been to one last week.’ ”
While a fiery spring sunset blazed outside, Cobbina spent a recent evening inside Legacy House, an East Side warehouse converted into a photography studio, to shoot a campaign for his other brand, Czen. As models filtered in, Cobbina surveyed their outfits and grabbed garments from a rack − “Can you do the black heels?”
Chase Cobbina, creator behind fashion brand Cafe, is photographed at The Cellar, one of the first places he began selling Cafe products. “There’s mad fashion shows here,” Cobbina says of the burgeoning Buffalo scene.
“We got style,” Cobbina said. “We haven’t broadcast what is Buffalo fashion to the masses.”
Cobbina wears a studded necklace that says “Buffalo Kids” around his neck. Everyone from the city is a “Buffalo Kid” to Cobbina, but he is also part of a group of Buffalo-born artists, including hip-hop collective Griselda and artist Travis Rogers of DNTWATCHTV, who are putting the city’s cultural scene on the international map.
“I remember a time when nobody cared about Buffalo and I was trying to figure out why I was here and how do I get to the next level?” Cobbina said. “The only thing I could fall back on was like, I’m from Buffalo. I’m not like these other people. I never will be.”
