This New York designer wants you to rethink the value of hard work

From Succession to Industry to Severance, culture’s preoccupation with work narratives has been well-documented over the past few years. As it happens, none of these workplace dramas paint rosy pictures of office life, either – it’s often the depiction of work’s pervasive, sinister nature that seems to be drawing audiences in.

The perils of work and labour have also been on the mind of Liv Masterson, the 26-year-old designer behind the emerging sustainable label Mortica Studios. The brand’s SS26 collection, Follow Suit, which debuts this week, explores the gamification of work. Taking inspiration from the aesthetics of New England, the collection combines the visual codes of both athletic wear (namely baseball) and business attire to make a statement about how work has become sports-like in nature. In the brand’s own words, it’s a meditation on “the state of our contemporary relationship to work, compliance, and the insatiable demand for performance in the American psyche”.

Masterson, who started the brand as an upcycling project while in college and recently committed to the brand full-time, has been grappling with these themes for a decade. Every aspect of the collection, from the imagery to the materials, is informed by Masterson’s preoccupation with labour. The title itself – Follow Suit – is taken from card play terminology, and describes a move in which a player plays the same card as the person before them. “The concept is not [about] villainising the person ‘following suit’, but more so confronting that it’s really extreme, and hard to opt out of because it’s so deeply ingrained,” says Masterson.

Below, we spoke to the designer about creating the collection, finding inspiration and unpacking her own relationship to work.

What’s your earliest fashion memory? 

Liv Masterson: Instead of counting sheep or reading before bed to fall asleep, I would create outfits in my head for the next day. It would be like the Clueless closet. I would just be mixing and matching. It was so fun, coming up with possible combinations in my head just to make myself fall asleep. Looking back, it makes sense that I’m a designer, because now I’m just designing the whole thing. But back then, I was visualising and styling just to pass the time. 

How would you describe the aesthetic of your brand? 

Liv Masterson: I would say it’s subversive and deconstructionist. I think it’s an avant-garde ready-to-wear with a focus on artisanal craftsmanship.

What was the inspiration behind this latest collection, Follow Suit? 

Liv Masterson: Follow Suit is an exploration of our relationship to work, wealth and identity. It explores uniform in the context of both sport and work as these dress codes for high-performance labour. In our language for those two contexts, there’s a lot of overlap in terms of optimisation and efficiency. Specifically in sport, I was looking at baseball, which is known as America’s pastime. I was thinking about how, today, we’re forced to spend most of our time working, and about how the golden era of baseball was parallel to that of Wall Street. The more I got into my research, the more it was this really captivating tunnel that led to more intersections of the two contexts. I was thinking about this golden era – especially this post-World War II, finance, greed, era of the 1980s – and about baseball as vignettes of the American dream; its origination, and also now, its brokenness, and the grief within that. 

What did some of the crossovers look like? 

Liv Masterson: The original baseball uniforms were wool pinstripe suiting, which is also the same as many classic business suits. And so, most of the collection is made from deadstock pinstripe wool suiting fabric. Also, with the baseball field being kind of this diamond shape, and Argyle being a very classic prep structure, I found that there were so many overlaid motifs and iconography between the two. 

Where do you think your interest in this tension comes from – the interest in exploring work and wealth in your designs? 

Liv Masterson: Part of it was just me being an artist and struggling with the reality of trying to balance being an artist full-time and working. But I think ultimately, what was most formative was that growing up, my dad taught at this prep school, which I went to for high school, and attended since I was, like, 12. I’m entirely grateful for the education, and it was a great experience overall, but it was a very interesting position, because I was being placed in an environment of really extreme wealth and was very proximate to it, but also not really a part of it, kind of feeling alien from it and just observing. A lot of the kids had parents on Wall Street. It was the epitome of, “there’s a path before you that you should follow”. But it felt very stripped from a lot of the beauty of humanity as well.

I am constantly working, and I think that it’s ironic because part of the narrative for the collection is that we are sacrificing a lot of our lives and humanity to work – Liv Masterson

After growing up in that environment, studying textiles at Rhode Island School of Design and then moving to New York, what would you say your own relationship to work is now?

Liv Masterson: I confront it a lot. There’s a lot of irony in it, because I care so deeply about my work, my craft and my art. I am constantly working, and I think that it’s ironic because part of the narrative for the collection is that we are sacrificing a lot of our lives and humanity to work. But also, my own work, and this work, is also a huge part of my life; it’s a part of what drives me. When I first developed this idea, I was working in a much more corporate job in fashion. It was like a study of corporate America. That was a very interesting experience just to be able to observe almost as research for this. But it was also this really frustrating time because I really wanted to devote more time to my brand, yet I also needed to work to be able to make ends meet. And so, it’s just a constant navigation of it.

Can you tell me about the film that accompanied the collection?

Liv Masterson: Early on, I knew that I wanted to depict the collection in motion. I was thinking a lot about the idea of it being this kind of marathon. As in, what if the catwalk was not a catwalk? What if it were a run? What if it were a treadmill? What if it were a sprint across the field? And so, I collaborated with my friend Leaf Lieber, who's a director, and we shot it on 35 millimetre film. We shot at this non-profit baseball field called American Legion in Brooklyn. We also shot at night, and were really balancing the two tones of this broken America dystopia, this lost identity, with the lightheartedness of game play and nostalgia, and also hope. 

Which four designers are on your fashion Mount Rushmore?

Liv Masterson: Rei Kawakubo, Martin Margiela, Alexander McQueen and Junya Watanabe.

If you could dress anyone, dead or alive, who would it be and why? 

Liv Masterson: Alive, I feel like Doechii is such an inspo right now, just because she’s been really channelling those similar aesthetics of prep and uniform, and her dedication to her craft and vision is really inspiring. Dead, I feel like Amelia Earhart is weirdly iconic for me. She’s just kind of this mystery being that is pretty legendary, and I think she would be really chic.

Can you walk me through some of your design process? 

Liv Masterson: I’m very research-based, in terms of how it starts, especially. I want to try to ingest what other people are saying, or how people are contributing to this larger conversation. Another huge part of it is the material development. I do a lot of sample development of ways I can manipulate and alter fabric. The initial stage is very experimental, and it’s very iterative. I’ll take an idea – maybe it’s this type of pleat, maybe it’s this crinkled texture – and I’ll find how many ways I can explore that or alter that and create something that’s more engineered.

Were there any pieces of media in your research that inspired this collection?

Liv Masterson: I was looking at the photography book Take Ivy, which is a depiction of origins of Ivy Style and how collegiate students at the time were blending informal styling with this very classic American prep formal attire. Another big moment of inspiration was the movie, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. I was thinking about this early on [version] of what American success is. Also, classic baseball and sports movies as metaphors for life arcs and character arcs. So, League of Their Own, Moneyball, things like that. 

What’s your favourite corner store snack? 

Liv Masterson: Maybe dried mango. 

That’s a good one. Okay, you’re trapped in an elevator with your celebrity crush. Who is it and what are you wearing?

Liv Masterson: I don’t know if I have a celebrity crush. What am I wearing? I’m wearing denim shorts or black jeans, black boots, black leather jacket. That’s my uniform. 

What’s the most ran-through item in your wardrobe? 

Liv Masterson: These denim shorts, probably, or maybe my Warped tee. 

What’s the most recent picture in your camera roll?

Liv Masterson: I found this collage from this Instagram account that posts archives, and it was this collage of all these businessmen in their suits and ties, talking about how everyone dresses the same. And I was like, exactly. This is the collection. 

If money is no object, where are you staging your first catwalk show?

Liv Masterson: A cave or under the cliffs of a coast–coastal cliffs. Icelandic, maybe. 

I’m seeing the vision. And what’s next for your brand? 

Liv Masterson: I’m just going to continue a lot of these ideas and keep expanding. I do think a show is on the horizon, too, but I really loved interweaving the different art forms of film. This is also the first collection that incorporates menswear, which I think is a huge new avenue that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. And a next big goal is also expanding into designed objects with a textile background. I definitely see the universe expanding into homeware, small products, functional objects and accessories.

Follow Suit will be available for pre-order on 11/24 on morticastudio.com.