The venue was behind the original CBGB's. The collection was called Deco Reverie by the Sea. The surprise performance was Guns N' Roses, upstairs at Varvatos, right after the show. If you needed a single image to capture what Karolina Zmarlak is about, that evening would do it: elegant and edgy in the same breath, architectural and alive, rooted in New York in a way that only happens when someone builds something slowly, from a studio apartment in Nolita, one client at a time.

Alexandra Diez de Rivera places antique children's dresses directly onto photo-sensitive paper and exposes them to light. The skin cells and body oils of whoever wore those clothes, perhaps a child who is no longer small, perhaps no longer alive, seep into the surface and become part of the image permanently. That is not a metaphor for memory. It is memory, made literal through photographic chemistry. There is no digital equivalent. There cannot be.