When the lights dimmed at the Bowery Ballroom on Wednesday night, Cucculelli Shaheen did what the brand has always done best: turned fashion into a live, breathing performance. Collection Twenty-Two, titled Electric Cosmos, arrived not as a seasonal offering but as a full sensory event, one that folded Art Deco mysticism into baroque glam rock and let Nashville-based band Calico Mantra score the whole thing in real time.
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The downtown Manhattan venue was a deliberate choice. The Bowery Ballroom, with its history of late-night sets and raw musical energy, mirrored the DNA of a house built by two people who met working in downtown New York in the mid-aughts and never stopped drawing from that world. Co-founders Anna Rose Shaheen and Anthony Cucculelli have spent nearly a decade channeling classical art, mythology, music, and the restless pulse of the city into collections that resist easy categorization. Electric Cosmos is no exception.
A Universe of Incandescent Myths
The collection draws from a constellation of references that reads like a fever dream playlist: mystic sunsets, smoke-filled salles fumeurs, Josiah McElheny’s Island Universe, cosmic ballrooms, and lilies of the night. What holds it together is the tension between darkness and illumination, structure and sensuality. Intricate hand embroideries and lily cabochons surface across pieces with the kind of obsessive detail that only comes from genuine craft. Sculptural detailing anchors the silhouettes, while fluid construction and detachable elements introduce movement and transformation, garments that shift as the wearer moves through space.
The band Calico Mantra, dressed in Cucculelli Shaheen designs themselves, set the tone from the stage. Their live energy carried through the room and into the clothes, reinforcing the idea that for this house, music is not a backdrop. It is a collaborator.
Inside the Process: A Conversation with Anna Rose Shaheen
Speaking with DSCENE Editor-in-Chief Zarko Davinic immediately after the show, Anna Rose Shaheen offered a window into how the brand operates, and why the numbered collection system matters.
“We kind of make our collections pretty timeless,” Shaheen explained. “We try not to be too specific within a season because I feel like our customers are shopping all the time. We can show a collection, someone might buy the piece off the runway, or they might think about it and buy it down the road.” The numbered system, now at twenty-two, reinforces that philosophy. These are not disposable seasonal drops. They are chapters.
On the embroidery, which remains one of the most striking elements of the Cucculelli Shaheen vocabulary, Shaheen confirmed that all work is done by hand in India. “It’s always a real collaboration happening,” she said, noting that while the team doesn’t travel to India as often as they would like, the partnership runs deep, sustained through constant communication and shared creative intent.
When asked about how inspiration finds its way into the work, Shaheen described a process that is less about structured research trips and more about remaining open. “Sometimes we find inspiration in unlikely places. We could go on trips, some are unexpected. We both traveled a lot to the studio and it was such a big inspiration for us.” The same instinct applies to music. “We’d go to a new venue with a band and it was an imaginative thing,” she added, underscoring the organic relationship between sound and design that defines the house.
Ten Years in the Making
Electric Cosmos also arrives at a significant moment. Cucculelli Shaheen will mark its ten-year anniversary this fall, a milestone that traces back to the brand’s founding in 2016. When asked whether something special is planned for the occasion, Shaheen smiled. “We are celebrating it,” she confirmed, though details remain under wraps.
Inside Flaming Hearts with Shaheen and Cucculelli
A decade in, the house continues to operate on its own terms. Anna Rose Shaheen and Anthony Cucculelli built their partnership through stints at Emilio Pucci, Oscar de la Renta, Burberry, Calvin Klein, Yigal Azrouel, and Roberto Cavalli, and a formative period designing together in Florence. That accumulated knowledge shows in the construction, the material intelligence, and the refusal to separate fashion from the cultural forces that surround it.
Collection Twenty-Two is rock and roll in the truest sense: not as an aesthetic shortcut, but as an attitude. Craftsmanship meeting chaos. Structure meeting freedom. The Bowery Ballroom, for one night, became exactly the kind of cosmic ballroom the collection imagined.
Images courtesy of Cucculelli Shaheen
