INTO: yard666sale’s Phantasmatic, Nightmarish Club Camp

All photos courtesy of yard666sale.

“Into” is a series dedicated to objects, artworks, garments, exhibitions, and all orders of things that we are into—and there really isn’t a lot more to it than that. Today: Carina Imbornone on the Quebec-based fashion line yard666sale, known for designs that mix horror, silk, and taglines like “j’adore dick.”

Somewhere in between New York Fashion Week and Halloween lies yard666sale, the brainchild of designer Dane Richards. The fashion line, which was built out of a pre-Depop Etsy shop, has the campy sensibility of a nightmare fueled by the most uncanny corners of meme Twitter. Like the Internet itself, yard666sale throws opposites together on the cutting room floor: the feminine and the masculine, the freaky and the demure, silk and the scary. Like fellow Quebec-province clubwear savants Matieres Fecales, yard666sale has built a brand at the nexus of traditional horror imagery and internet irony. There must just be something about an icy, stay-in-your-house-and-scroll-through-Instagram Canadian winter that would inspire such an e-camp aesthetic.

Central to the yard666sale project is the juxtaposition between silk and lace and clickbait text that reads like erasure poetry from a Berlin rave poster; stitched to vintage teddies and sheer tops are shock-camp slogans like “beauty dies in LSD orgy after sex with 100 men”; “j’adore dick”; “laugh at the wish it’s my darling”; or this alternatively endearing poem: “I love you/be happy with you my/ honey here many sweet food/ for you come here dance with me/ do you know how many apples in my home.” Maybe there’s just something about a phantasm a bit scarier than Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” stitched atop of a pair of floral briefs mixing the masc and the femme to create a fuse of genderqueer street couture. Add in a decidedly DIY, found-at-thrift vision and you get something darkly funny in a way that reminds you how much absurdity lies in the macabre. If Hot Topic found a home in deep Bushwick, I imagine that the demon-decaled silk teddies of yard666sale would be on display. And yes, that is a compliment.