Fashion & Accessories Residency
At the edge of the sea, queer designers found freedom. Now, it finds its future.
The QCAF Fashion & Accessories Residency invites queer designers to live, create, and reflect on Fire Island—developing capsule fashion and accessories collections, resortwear, or swimwear lines that speak to identity, ancestry, and aesthetic evolution.
This isn’t a factory or fast-fashion sprint. It’s an unhurried creative incubation. Designers are housed in homes with profound and complex queer history, surrounded by the ghosts of runway shows past and the sounds of waves that have always carried our stories.
You are not just here to make—you’re here to remember.
To feel the presence of those who once stitched sequins poolside.
To commune with the energies that made Fire Island both a refuge and a runway.
Whether your medium is silk, leather, or metal hardware—this is a place to craft with meaning.
Residents are encouraged to create capsule collections or single-category bodies of work (accessories, swim, or resort), with access to archives, mentorship, and inspiration drawn directly from the Fire Island queer community life and global design leaders.
Your time here will culminate in a public presentation—whether through Fire Island Fashion Week, a gallery installation, or a collaborative editorial feature in Fire Island Tea.
Residency Highlights:
1–3 weeks of focused creation.
Capsule collection, swimwear, or resortwear development.
Materials stipend + mentorship from QCAF creatives.
Optional participation in Fire Island Fashion Week.
Culminating event, talk, or editorial showcase.
Why Fire Island?
For generations, queer people came here not only to escape, but to express. To dress without shame. To create without permission. To be fully, fabulously seen. From impromptu photoshoots on the beach to poolside fashion shows stitched together with ingenuity and joy, the Pines became a crucible for queer aesthetics—raw, radical, and refined.
But this flourishing world was nearly erased.
The AIDS epidemic didn’t just claim lives. It stole futures. It gutted an entire generation of queer artists, designers, and visionaries—many of whom had found their creative home right here. It silenced ateliers, erased sketchbooks, halted collections mid-design. The rhythm of creation slowed, then stopped.
The QCAF Fashion & Accessories Residency is a response to that silence.
It is a call back to the land where so many dreamed and died—and a commitment to continue what they began. We choose Fire Island because it holds the ghosts of possibility. Because it asks us to remember not only who we lost, but what they were building.
To create here is to converse with the past.
To sketch here is to stitch memory into modernity.
To design here is to participate in a lineage of queer resistance, resilience, and radiance.
This is sacred ground. And for a queer designer, there’s no more powerful place to begin.