New York City has long stood shoulder to shoulder with Paris and Milan as a global fashion capital, at times claiming the crown as the world’s most influential city of style, and at others, ceding it to its European rivals. But in recent years, there has been an inarguable “falloff” in New York Fashion Week’s prominence, as if the island of Manhattan itself had just drifted off into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Paris and Milan never lost their Saint Laurent or Prada footing, whereas cities like London cultivated newer talents like Dilara Findikoglu and Simone Rocha, and even Copenhagen reached new peaks of cool, with major editors, celebrities, and influencers flying to Denmark each season with the same enthusiasm once reserved for sitting front row at Hood By Air.

“Why” New York fell off is less certain than “if” it did, but part of it surely lay in the unstoppable ascent of commercial brands less concerned with courting the European glitterati than with dressing the Middle-American middle class.

Now, a handful of emerging New York–based designers, such as Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen, are creating clothes that, within a few years, could restore the city’s cool factor—pushing back against the larger, purely capital-driven brands that have come to dominate the city that never sleeps.

So the question is—can designers like Gustavia, whose clothing is featured on this digital cover story, bring about New York City’s fashion renaissance? Call us optimists, but with talent like this, we’re thinking “yes.”