Puppets and Puppets put a cookie on a handbag, and the rest is history

Puppets and Puppets — the art-school, cool-kid brand co-founded by Carly Mark — is messing with you.

A saxophonist who ordinarily busks on the subway sounded the opening notes of George Michael’s cornball hit “Careless Whisper” as the models walked across the linoleum floor. A handle for one of the bags was an oversized spoon. Some dresses had a train in the front, which the models carried in their teeth. One model walked the runway with a faux banana, aging and brown-spotted, slung on leather straps as if it were a cross-body purse.

Not everyone gets the joke. Puppets’ work is the type of thing that always inspires “This is fashion?” comments from people who think fashion should be lovely. The thing is: Puppets and Puppets is also lovely. Some of the looks are shimmery cocktail dresses that would look appropriate at the Grammys or an elegant wedding. Humor is dependent on context. Carly Mark is the puppet master, and she’s pulling the strings.

“I’m laughing at you,” says Mark, “but you’re in on the joke.”

Mark moved to New York from Detroit in the mid-2000s to attend the School of Visual Arts. She made paintings of Haribo gummy bear bags and sculptures of sex toys. But mostly she floundered around, wondering why living her dream of becoming an artist felt so unfulfilling.

“I spent a decade,” she says, “maybe even a little bit more, engaged in the art world in this almost like clenching-my-fist type of way, being like, ‘I’m going to figure this out. I’m going to do it. I’m going to be successful.’”

As an art piece, she decided to make a selection of costumes, inspired by consumerism, with Ayla Argentina, who would become a Puppets and Puppets co-founder (and is no longer involved in the brand). The pieces were clownish and a bit grotesque: an overstuffed birthday cake, a half-man-half-tiger in a powder blue suit, a sexy Haribo bear. People told her that she should consider making more.

“I was just like, ‘If this goes well, great, I’ll keep going,’” Mark says. “If not, I’ll write it off as an art piece.”

She did not have to write it off as an art piece. The first Puppets and Puppets collection debuted in 2019. The clothing from her first few shows — where models walked the runway in harlequin clown-inspired suits, or egg carton shoes made from plastic foam, or a see-through bodysuit affixed with the type of gold angel wings you might see on a kid’s Halloween costume — never went into wider commercial production. But buyers began to ask, and that became its own challenge: How do you turn a jokey art project into an actual business?

“I’ve learned a lot since I started almost five years ago, but I can’t sew,” says Mark. “I can’t make anything for myself.”

Mark had to find employees who understand the production side of the business, which has not yet turned a profit.

“I just start asking around,” Mark says. “‘Hey, I really need help sourcing fabrics.’ ‘Hey, I really need help understanding how to budget.’ ‘I really need help building a financial plan.’ And if you just keep asking people, eventually someone shows up.”

Bergdorf Goodman and Ssense are now among the retailers that carry Puppets clothes, which sell for between $200 (for a T-shirt) and around $2,000 (for an evening gown).

The cookie bag ($545) has become the brand’s most recognizable symbol. It’s chic and goofy. The centerpiece is a hyper-realistic resin sculpture of a cookie, with glossy chocolate chips and the wrinkles you’d find in a homemade batch. It’s not just a joke, though.

“Yeah, it is this cute thing, it’s a cookie on a bag,” Mark says. “But I’ve also kind of tricked you because it’s a fake fake. … It’s talking about logos and it’s talking about handbags and it’s talking about fashion in this very actually cerebral way. … It’s actually kind of like a punk object. Like, there is something kind of gothic style about it.”

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There are other variations on the bag, with roses, a banana, a fried egg, and — in the newest collection — a spider.

“I think of [the bags] in a sculptural way,” she says. “I think of them in a cinematic way. I think of them in terms of how I used to decide to make a painting.”

Puppets and Puppets is named after Mark’s beloved Chihuahua, Puppet, but it’s a name with multiple layers. Models are puppets that designers manipulate, and consumers are, too. The term puppet master — which the brand has emblazoned on shirts, and Mark has tattooed on her body — is a reference to a character in the film “Ghost in the Shell,” and she likes the duality of how it can represent something playful and also sinister.

Playful and sinister can describe Mark’s work, too. She frequently references horror films. There’s a lot of gothy black. And there are visual jokes, like the time Mark sent a model down the runway in a bra designed to look as if there were two sunny-side-up eggs covering her breasts.

“Carly is curious, twisted, laser-focused, hilarious, unfussy, nerdy, and also just super hot,” says the singer Caroline Polachek, a friend, via email. “She’s not interested in being cool, which of course makes her actually cool.”

Lately, the brand has been experimenting with prints that come from AI-generated images, which also came from a joke. During a meeting, an assistant asked who would be making a line of their T-shirts, referencing a company that was a potential partner. But Mark replied with absurdist humor: “I was like, ‘It’s my boyfriend. He lives in his basement with his parents. He makes our T-shirts and he loves metal.’”

For fun, they fed the prompt “Basement New Jersey metal boyfriends living with parents” into Midjourney, an AI program, which generated a print Mark loved: a selection of long-haired, bearded, middle-aged guys in skull T-shirts standing in their unkempt basements, with walls covered in metal posters. It appears on several pieces this season.

“It’s really amazing to be able to see something in your head,” she says, “and verbalize that to a computer, and they spit it back out at you, but in a very dreamlike state.”

That dreamlike state carried over into the show, where a confluence of characters were waiting to see what Puppets came up with for its spring/summer season. In one corner, the filmmaker Miranda July was making a fake sponsored video post for Gorton’s fish sticks. In another, Rebecca Black — remember that viral song “Friday?” — vamped for photos in a black gown. Consider the vast gap in coolness between Ella Emhoff, talking to friends with dyed-pink eyebrows and neon green skateboards, and her hovering Secret Service protection, who tried to blend in as much as possible by wearing a polo shirt — which actually stuck out.

Actress Julia Fox, wearing a snakeskin jumpsuit in the front row, praised Mark as a “visionary.” Up by the top of the runway, actress Tallulah Willis (daughter of Bruce) and model Alana Hadid (sister of Gigi and Bella) were chatting with Instagram-famous fashion dog Tika the Iggy, an Italian greyhound, and her human, Thomas Shapiro.

Puppets has “excitement and whimsy,” says Hadid. When she walked in and saw the animatronic animals, “I was like, hell, yeah.”

Models stomped the runway in sequiny dresses and extra-wide-legged pants with hoodies. One dress featured a picture of a unicorn — not the cute, rainbow, sparkly kind, but the creepy, medieval kind.

After the models took their final walk, Mark emerged from backstage in a T-shirt with her AI metalhead boyfriend print. The applause was rapturous. In this audience, everyone got the joke.