By Catinca Negut
If 2026 was the Year of the Horse, Evanie Frausto is already making a case for 2027 to belong to the pony.
For SHOWPONY’s second NYFW season, Frausto strips down and X-rays the wig. What usually stays hidden (knots, construction, tracks, the underside) becomes the point. Inverted wigs are reimagined as crinolines and naked dresses, while hair grows into braided gowns, jewellery, hairy claws and shoes. The wig becomes the body.
Hair him out.
SHOWPONY is, quite literally, made from human hair, with deadstock hair at the core of Frausto’s practice. This season, the material vocabulary gains volume: wool and mohair mimic its texture, while silk is screen-printed to look like strands. The closer you look, the harder it becomes to tell what is hair and what is pretending to be.
The colour story comes straight from the hair laboratory. Pravana dyes push saturated reds and blues through the collection (sacrifice and rebirth, cleansing and renewal), while lunar tones make everything feel instinctive and slightly primal. But SHOWPONY never takes itself seriously enough to stop the ritual from becoming camp.
Kali Kennedy’s makeup completes the transformation with an ethereal, holographic sheen: part alien, part deity, part freshly-showered pony.
And Evanie knows best how to make hair matter.
One of the most recognisable celebrity hairstylists of his generation, he has shaped some of contemporary pop culture’s most instantly recognisable hair moments, from Nicole Kidman and Lady Gaga to Sabrina Carpenter and KATSEYE, to name a few. His work has lived inside fashion imagery, music, red carpets and pop spectacle. But SHOWPONY is where he gets to stop being the person behind the image and become the artist building the world around it.
A separate universe where the strange ideas that cannot necessarily live on a client’s head can finally go full blowout. Excessive, funny, sensual, uncomfortable, beautiful, and completely impractical, sometimes all at once.
For SS27, that universe went digital.
Presented at New York’s Ukrainian National Home and streamed live on Twitch, the runway became part fashion show, part broadcast, part ritual. A chess champion and Twitch streamer (Nemo) joined the cast, folding internet culture into the SHOWPONY mythology, while COBRAH soundtracked and closed the show. Later, the ponies left the runway for Gospël, where COBRAH and Jenny Rossander carried the ritual into the night with two electrifying, hybrid DJ sets.
And the mythology didn’t stop at the show. Alongside the collection, Frausto released TOCADO, a collaborative book pairing photography by Jeffrey Pearson with Evanie’s hair and creative direction. Featuring talent from his community, the publication gives its gross proceeds to the Ali Forney Center, supporting LGBTQ+ homeless youth in New York.
SHOWPONY began with hair. This season, Frausto turned the wig inside out, pulled it over the body, sent it through Twitch, and let it loose on the dance floor.
The roots are showing, even with a ponytail.
