I’ll never look at playing cards the same way–in the best way, of course. The melodic, magnetic shuffling of playing cards, building into a bridge and folding back flat. Slapping cards down to each player, face down with anticipation to what fortune lays ahead of you, similar to the way life shakes out in general. What cards will be dealt as soon as we open our eyes in the morning, when we make the choice to pursue a degree or passion, when we accept that job offer. Will you fold or are you all in?

Regardless of your industry, timeline, values or outlook, legacy means adaptability, resilience, having a vision and making an impact. Ultimately, legacy means taking advantage of the cards you’re dealt in this lifetime, and playing them well. Is it all the luck of the draw? Is it years of hard work and grit? Are we meant to take agency over uncertainty or accept a fate that’s been laid out for us? Maybe you strike a bullseye early on and completely understand your life's purpose, or maybe you scratch an 8-ball and restart a few times.

Items like the camera obscura have built a lasting legacy by showcasing projections and being a revolutionary product through flipped visuals. Obscura knows that to play our cards right, we have to be able to flip the perspective, and explore opportunities and stories in a new light. Our mantra will always be to observe, investigate, and create.

Part of playing our cards right meant hosting our first event in the bright, big apple of New York City, America’s fashion capital. This was just the start of our mission to uplift our community and spark open, transformative conversations through fashion and culture.

On September 27, fashion tastemakers and multi-disciplinary creatives alike came together to celebrate one year of Obscura Zine. The celebratory exhibition was conceptualized around this theme and showcasing the legacy and purpose that ourselves and our surrounding community want to imprint on this world. We were lucky enough to showcase five different artists, a fashion presentation showcasing three different emerging designers, four vendors of various products, and one killer DJ, all under the roof of VERS, a sustainable and queer designer boutique in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Angel Le

Angel Le is a multidisciplinary artist that specializes in animation and fashion design. In her digital and physical works, she experiments with light and dreamy motifs in order to weave in a level of conceptual storytelling. Angel is a student at Pratt Institute and hopes to spark curiosity through her impressionistic and romantic designs.

Grace Jung

Grace is a sculptor, production designer, and installation artist working to bridge realms of biology, material science, and spirit through her creations. She explores layers of biological systems through mechanisms of play to uncover something buried deep in her ancestral memory.

Alexia Hill

Alexia Hill is a poet and mixed multi-media artist that utilizes scrap materials and aims to uncover curious storytelling in the imperfect. Her adolescence, humanity, authenticity, connection and creative collaboration fuel Alexia’s art. Magazines like Dazed, Creem, and 032, and artists such as Gustav Klimt, Anna Sui, Patti Smith, Vangel Naumovski, Chiho Aoshima, and of course, the one and only Bella Pietro inspire her craft.

Yesenia Follingstad

Yesenia finds inspiration in pretty much everything - she’s a water sign like that (Scorpio though, don’t get it twisted). Besides a fashion journalist, she’s also a creative writer and marketer. She approaches her craft with curiosity, connection, and a good amount of humor. A creative at heart, she’s an interior design and DIY enthusiast and hopes her future self is an intermediate seamstress with too many vintage bags and shoes to count. Yesenia is passionate about sustainability and inclusivity within the fashion industry and has Carla Fernandez’s Manifesto of Fashion as Resistance pinned to her wall as a North Star.

Veronica McNally

When The Xu Fits is a play on words, incorporating the translated English meaning of “little wheat,” WTXF is a fashion-sphere to lay down pompous attitudes about fashion. Independent, first-generation sustainable designer, Veronica Xu Mai McNally is thrilled to share her sustainable couture. WXTF and Xu the Label are an ode to staying true to yourself. Transforming donated materials into 1/1 pieces. Meticulously crafted, every look tells a story. WXTF is the most vulnerable aspect of Veronica’s life spun into unique playful motifs that will stick with you. To share the magic is to connect with the version of you reading this right now.

Sarah Djarnie of Shop Volta BK

Sarah’s artwork explores the beauty, strength, and stories of Black women through the lens of doll-making and portraiture. Drawing inspiration from African art, folklore, and history, she creates dolls that reflect cultural memory and lived experience.

Sustainability is at the heart of Djarnie’s process, often reusing scrap fabrics and found materials, giving them new life as part of each creation. Each project begins with a theme, heritage, resilience, or identity, and guides the choice of materials, textiles, and design. Her work is connected through a consistent focus on storytelling, community, and honoring the African Diaspora.

McKenzie Grant-Gordon of L.S. Made

McKenzie is a Jamaican-American multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She utilizes photography, textiles, and glass to capture the motion and richness of life across the Caribbean diaspora. Through these mediums, she investigates our relationship to our bodies, the environment, and ancestral memory.

Chana Goodman of Parfums Obim

Chana Goodman, grew up in the Pacific Northwest in a family of professional painters, musicians, historians and wine merchants. From a young age and into her 20’s, Chana was trained as a sommelier by her step-father at his company, Bianco-Rosso Imports.

With degrees in philosophy, mathematics, and design, Chana embarked on a career spanning over two decades in the professional design industry. She worked primarily in the beauty sector as an illustrator and lead packaging/branding designer, contributing to renowned brands such as Marc Jacobs, Beyoncé Knowles, Nautica, Elizabeth Arden, Phyto, DKNY, Michael Kors, and Caron, under professional teams at COTY, Ales Group, and Syntax NYC.

Chana's lifelong curiosity and passion for aroma and fragrance led her to mentorship with perfumer Iris Parker. This mentorship inspired the creation of a full line of fragrances, which she now sells from her open-lab showroom in Bushwick, Brooklyn, NYC.

Ethan Christe of Warming Worldwide

WARMING Worldwide is an independent streetwear label founded by designer Ethan Christe in 2017, blending luxury fashion with nostalgic, concept-driven pieces. Rooted in Christe’s background in screenprinting, graphic design, and traditional fashion, WARMING is defined by its craftsmanship, community, and storytelling. Inspired by Virgil Abloh, racing, and skate culture, the brand plays with juxtaposition—the name itself WARMING stems from the comforting connotation of the word and the urgency of the all-capitalized visualization of the word. With garments adorning actual Hot Wheels and Formula One cars from his personal collection, his latest limited-run graphic t-shirt drop, and archive pieces at the pop-up, WARMING continues to grow its cult following and carve its own lane in contemporary streetwear.

Robin Aguirre AKA DJ Throb

Throb is an emerging DJ project that fuses underground dance sounds with maximalist fashion and artistry. Her mixes feature high-energy beats influenced by genres such as techno, Brazilian funk, Jersey club, dance, and dubstep.

Throb is for the girls, the gays, weirdos, dancers, artists, ravers, whores, and lovers alike—anyone who wants to be consumed by the passion put into underground anti-establishment dance music. To Throb means to release pain through dancing and gain community through a shared love for humanity.

Throb’s mixing organically led us into our fashion presentation, unfolding as a living allegory of rebellion and propelling your own destiny. Three models, each dressed by rising student designers Lena Mars, Veronica McNally of When The Xu Fits, and Yves of Plutonic, carried the narrative.

At its center stood Toryn Abbruzze, blindfolded and bound in a custom When The Xu Fits bunny-eared balaclava crafted from scrap fabrics, patterned with signature playing-card symbols. Guided into the room by two companions, she moved restrained, unable to play her own hand. Around her, the others exchanged cards with light-hearted ease, reveling in chance and choice while she remained blocked from the game.

But as her companions unwrapped the bindings, Toryn discovered the world anew—curious, wide-eyed, and asked to choose a card. The draw, however, wasn’t hers to claim. Seeing her fate pre-written, she tore the card in defiance, scattering the pieces to the ground. Through this act, she declared independence: rejecting limitations, discarding expectations, and choosing to play life by her own rules.

The models then walked throughout the space, posing amongst the exhibits, and handing cards to guests, including a raffle card to one lucky guest of the night, winning a custom one-of-one Obscura purse and T-shirt.

In the back of the space, guests partook in our legacy, observing and interacting with Obscura’s heart on its sleeve–– or rather, on the wall. Envelopes made up a red heart where the Obscura team left notes for guests, and guests in return left a note about what legacy means to them. Here’s what just a few of them said:

“Legacy is the namesakes and freckles on my face. Pride in strong women before me who’ve done it alone. I carry it on, like I was born to it. Resilience.”
“Legacy is the space you take and hold for those after you.”
“Being that bitch all the time, leaving a sickening taste in people’s mouth, and of course, leaving things better than how you found them.”
“I think legacy is always more about the joy you feel about your life, rather than any success on paper.”
“Legacy means ‘Let’s go see…”
“You’re already it, it just takes time to accumulate your goodness and for the world to notice it. We all leave trails behind our legacy.”
“Legacy is the burning soul leaving its imprint on those who survive through it all and to live to tell the tale.”
“Legacy is the drumbeat of ancestral spirit.”

In a persistently pixelated world, with numbers from follower counts to dollar bills swirling around our heads, it’s hard to build community in a real way. It’s becoming a buzzword, something we all want to hear but don’t want to work for–– much like authenticity, natural, etc. Safe to say, we put in the blood, sweat, money, time and tears for this, and we are so thankful to have seen it come to life, to bring together such amazing faces and creatives. Obscura is officially in its ‘Terrible Twos’ and we hope you’re ready for what’s in store next. We’re all in.