SkankChic is a Brooklyn-based fashion and lifestyle brand founded in 2023 by artist, designer, and stylist Mary Joyce McFarland. The brand operates at the intersection of fashion, art, poetry, and philosophy — producing handmade accessories, couture pieces, and conceptual objects.
The name is a thesis statement. Two words that don't belong together. Where punk meets posh. Where street meets high end. Where mourning becomes something you can wear.
The product line is anchored by handmade resin bangles produced in over 80 colorways — from solid opaque and frosted finishes to pieces with dollar bills, pills, and rhinestones cast inside. Beyond bangles, the line extends into hats, belts, shoes, earrings, belly rings, necklaces, and one-of-one sculptural couture pieces reserved for high fashion editorials and major artist campaigns. In under three years, with zero paid advertising or influencer spend, SkankChic has placed work on Lady Gaga, Tyla, Zara Larsson, Kim Petras, Doechii, and appeared on the covers of The Cut, King Kong, Out, LadyGunn, To Be, and Purple Magazine.
Mary J is a second-generation immigrant with roots in the Luo tribe of Kenya, raised in Utah before attending boarding school in Connecticut. She moved to New York City in 2021, graduated from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts in 2024 with a degree in Literary Analysis and Criticism concentrating in poetry, and has spent the years between building Skank Chic.
Her entry into fashion came through an unlikely way. Visiting a café in Chelsea run by Raul Avila, the event director of the Met Gala, led to an invitation to assist on the event in 2021, her first year in the city. She went on to work as a florist for the same shop, whose clients included Dolce & Gabbana and Vogue, before moving into fashion production and eventually styling. Her assisting credits include Rita Melssen on personal styling for Madonna and Dolce & Gabbana editorial campaigns, assisted Nicola Formichetti's Studio Formichetti across Purple Magazine's September issue shot by Steven Klein, Vogue Singapore's Fall cover story, and V Magazine and VMan editorial campaigns, worked with Genesis Webb on Chappell Roan's VMA looks, and assisted on projects for Sirius XM, Exit Magazine with King Krule, Adidas' Coi Leray campaign and Look One Magazine. On the production side, she worked backstage at Head of State, Vogue World, and Michael Kors during New York Fashion Week in 2022.
Her photography has been published in Office Magazine and Sacrebleu! Magazine, where she shot the Orientation x LuByLu capsule collection fashion editorial in 2022.
SkankChic launched in June 2023 as an extension of everything McFarland was already making — accessories she had been bringing onto sets and into offices, pieces that filled a gap she kept noticing in the styling world. Within its first year the brand was stocked at Retail Pharmacy on the Lower East Side and featured in Purple Magazine and Dazed.
Mary J's work is rooted in the lived experience of navigating spaces built against her— the womanhood denied to her in Utah lives in how hyper-feminine her designs are, the grief she was never permitted to show exists in the black veiled hats, the wealth she was kept adjacent to but never inside lives in the money cast in resin and the rhinestones standing in for diamonds. The guns, the pills, the bullets — the motifs that once shaped how she was perceived regardless of her intention. Her designs don't illustrate these experiences so much as they metabolize them. That is Skank Chic, that is Mary Joyce.