New York Fashion Week: Sustainable fashion is a drag!

Raja Gemini, Yvie Oddly, Lady Bunny, House of Xtravaganza, Plasma, King Molasses, Julie J, along with New York’s fiercest drag artists bring Zero Waste Daniel’s SS26 collection to life in a one-night-only Fashion Week spectacular.

New York Fashion Week has seen its share of spectacle, but Monday night Zero Waste Daniel set the stage ablaze with an explosion of color, performance, and joy. For Spring/Summer 2026, the brand shattered runway conventions, trading the catwalk for a one-night-only drag show. Drag icons and ballroom legends brought the collection to life, lip-syncing and performing in upcycled couture as muses, models, and headlining entertainers, transforming the night into a dazzling fusion of fashion and performance art.

Each look is handmade in New York using Zero Waste Daniel’s signature up-cycled fabrics. The collection was created in conversation with the performers. Inspiration for the collection traces back to The Harlequin Boy, a childhood story creative director Daniel Silverstein’s parents read to him. In it, a clever Venetian boy dreams of going to Carnival but does not have a costume, so he gathers scraps from others’ outfits and sews them together, creating a patchwork look that outshines them all. That vision of resourcefulness and beauty in fragments became the seed of Zero Waste Daniel, and Monday, it bloomed on the New York stage.

The lineup was nothing short of unmissable: Raja Gemini and Yvie Oddly, both winners of RuPaul’s Drag Race, stepped into Zero Waste Daniel’s up-cycled couture. Yvie’’ look, sewn from a retired hot air balloon donated by a lifelong friend of Silverstein’s, featured a 20-foot train and covered the stage, billowing as Yvie performed Shirley Bassey’s “Over the Rainbow”.

The show was hosted by Kiki Ball-Change and Selma Nilla and also featured Drag Race alum Plasma and self-proclaimed “theater queen” in a tribute to Bernadette Peters, a set from the legendary House of Xtravaganza, King of Drag winner King Molasses, Julie J, Essa Noche, Dawn, Hanukah Lewinsky, Chelsea Piers, and Kizha Carr, New York’s reigning “Entertainer of the Year” and a live rendition of Andrea Bocelli’s “Time to Say Goodbye” from Jasmine Rice LaBeija.

Lady Bunny, nightlife pioneer, DJed the opening soundtrack.

Presented with support from Ithaca Hummus, Tony Award winner J. Harrison Ghee; Drag Race’s Nymphia Wind, Laganja Estranja, and Tayce; Oh, Mary!’s Hannah Solow; dancer and content creator Alex Wong; and legendary model Dawn Gallagher, amongst various other key figures from the worlds of media, TV, drag, and theatre, cheered on the entertainers and gagged over the new collection.