Renee Cafaro’s New York Fashion Week collection , “The Alchemy,” arrives at a moment when the designer is thinking about more than what she wants to make next season. She’s thinking about what she wants to leave behind. Cafaro says she’s tired of overconsumption, algorithmic sameness, the pressure to make oneself legible as a brand and even some of her own anxieties about whether her work is sufficiently marketable.

“I believe that we always must be transforming and evolving as people,” Cafaro shared in an interview with me. “I fear we’ve all gotten so concerned with staying within our brand, performing for algorithms, or committing to a particular silo of thought that we as a society have flattened ourselves to two-dimensional characters that can be grasped fully within 15-second scrolling intervals.” She says that growth requires allowing ourselves to change, and getting comfortable with being imperfect.

That philosophy became the foundation of “The Alchemy,” a collection Cafaro describes as a sort of wearable manifesto. “I yearned to take all the negativity and darkness we face and turn it into something positive and beautiful in order to thrive, like nature has done forever,” shared Cafaro. If last year’s collection was her “rage against the system,” Cafaro says, this one represents “the healing and the world I’d like to build in its place.”

Cafaro’s career in fashion began with plus-size women and accessibility features, informed in part by Cafaro’s own experience as a 2X woman with invisible disabilities. Her clientele has expanded to include trans men, nonbinary people, big-and-tall customers and midsize women whose proportions aren’t adequately served by existing petite sizing. “I live for those challenges,” she says, particularly the process of figuring out how a pattern or fit can be reengineered to give someone something they have never been able to find. Rather than assuming she already understands every body, Cafaro says she actively seeks out people across different communities of size and ability to better understand their needs. The payoff isn’t necessarily a viral runway moment. Sometimes it’s one person looking in the mirror and feeling good.

Her first show began as a virtual runway video before an opportunity with NYFW x Fifth turned it into an in-person presentation. In those early days, Cafaro says she was more preoccupied with imposter syndrome, marketability and conventional measures of prominence. Now, she is increasingly willing to simply call herself an artist. “I’d much rather be a bit eccentric and find my community who appreciates what I do than striving to compete with the big brands at all costs,” she says.

For decades, plus size consumers have been forced to settle for the basic question of access: “Does this come in my size?” Cafaro’s work asks what becomes possible once designers move toward self-expression, craftsmanship, experimentation and even extravagance.

This September marks Cafaro’s fifth season with NYFW. She says, “No matter how early I start, there will always be scrambling and stress right before a show.” Cafaro continues frankly, “Fashion is deeply unglamorous work to put on a very glamorous show.” For Cafaro, the larger lesson of five seasons at NYFW may be about what happens when a designer stops trying to prove that plus size people belong in fashion and begins asking what fashion can become when their belonging is taken as a given. Cafaro says her goal is to teach NYFW “that all sizes and all genders deserve luxurious sartorial art and that we look killer doing it.” Each season, she tries to raise the bar for herself and, in turn, “push plus size fashion to a higher standard and pave the way for a lot more representation on runways.” Her fundamental vision is about creating high-quality couture for larger bodies, and she says that hasn’t changed since her first show.

Each piece in “The Alchemy” collection is rooted in sustainability and incorporates either a global collaboration or an element of the natural world. For Cafaro, collaboration itself is part of the collection’s philosophy. “By learning from each other and collaborating, we can create the greatest alchemy,” she says.

The uncomfortable truth is that the sustainability conversation can look different when you’re a plus-size shopper . “Circularity and sustainable shopping is something I didn’t feel plus sizes get access to at all,” Cafaro says. “Rarely are thrift stores carrying our sizes and we largely are served by fast fashion, which is in complete opposition to sustainability.” Importantly, Cafaro isn’t interested in blaming plus size consumers for buying the clothes that are actually available to them. “I don’t judge people who buy fast fashion as that’s usually the only option due to size or budget,” she says. Instead, she’s questioning an entire culture of disposability. She hopes consumers will begin to reject “overconsumption and tossing clothes as soon as it’s posted once on TikTok.” She emphasizes that this attitude isn’t just about clothes. “Our bodies are not fleeting trends or temporary structures,” Cafaro says, “so we need to stop acting like that.”

Her advice to consumers is to save for well-made garments, keep them, alter them, rework what you already own and imagine a wardrobe as something that can evolve alongside the person wearing it.

Guests at Cafaro’s NYFW show were also introduced to a secret second collection called “Something Borrowed,” her first official bridal couture collection. The collection extends “The Alchemy’s” interest in sustainability by literally borrowing from Cafaro herself. While downsizing her studio, Cafaro gathered leftover materials and fabric from previous runway samples and reworked them into bridal pieces. “I hope I can show folks that you can give a beautiful new life to any garment,” she says.

"Something Borrowed" represents Cafaro’s interest in entering the bridal fashion world on a larger scale. Her vision for bridal circularity is to design the different looks a client needs for their wedding and then have that client return years later with the original garments. Instead of storing or shortening a wedding dress, Cafaro wants clients to bring the garment back so she can deconstruct and upcycle it into something they’ll actually wear.

Even the way Cafaro wants people to experience the runway reflects her love affair with transformation and presence. This year, she made an unusual request for NYFW. She asked her audience to put down their phones. “We are always living through our phones, multitasking, and becoming parasocial,” she says. She wanted guests to “fully metabolize the event," to look at the art, talk to the person sitting beside them and experience the show through their own eyes rather than primarily through a tiny screen. She hopes that Fashion Week can become something more than “a reason to post for clout.”

After years of fighting for plus size representation, Cafaro is increasingly giving herself permission to make work that doesn’t have to justify its existence by being maximally commercial, palatable or easy to categorize. Maybe that is the most interesting alchemy happening here. The plus size girl who was told she could be smart or funny, but not “the fashion girl," became a designer anyway. Now with five Septembers at NYFW under her belt, Cafaro seems less interested in proving she deserves to be there than in deciding what she wants to do with the space she’s got. If that isn’t sustainability in practice, I don’t know what is.