There was a time when an invitation to a mobbed AsFour fashion show was like a passport to downtown cool. For the better part of the raucous New York 1990s, what was then a four-person collective could be counted on to pull in style editors and scene-makers, stars and wannabes, drag queens and club kids, the cast of “The Brown Bunny” and all of the people who exerted influence before an influencer was a thing.
Yoko Ono was a regular at those fashion shows — hard to miss in her granny glasses, tailcoat and silk top hat — packed in alongside Chloë Sevigny and Natasha Lyonne. Specialty boutiques like Seven New York in SoHo carried the conceptual clothing that the collective’s designers — Gabi Asfour, Adi Gil, Angela Donhauser and Kai Kuhne — produced. So, too, did mainstream outlets like Barneys New York.
Colette, the echt Parisian concept store, anointed them rising stars not long after Björk wore its surrealist sea creature dress for a W magazine cover. Mariah Carey glimmered in a swirling gold AsFour confection on the front of her platinum-selling 2005 comeback album, “The Emancipation of Mimi.”
If AsFour collections did not always generate uncritical reviews, they attracted acclaim and reams of newsprint, like when the then-hot designer Helmut Lang was caught appropriating its signature Circle handbag. For a time and from the outside, it often seemed as though the four original members were a design cult dusted in glitter, an irresistible boho collective that generated copy as much for their unconventional looks and lifestyle as for their clothes.
Living together in a raw silver-painted loft called the Silver Cage, they all slept together in a modular loft bed and fell into and out of amorous partnerships: housemates, partners, friends. Their mascot was a pink-dyed pit bull whose name, in the spirit of the era, was Powder.
“They envisioned the Kool-Aid, made the Kool-Aid, drank the Kool-Aid and disseminated the Kool-Aid,” said Kelly Cutrone, who was a publicist for AsFour during the collective’s heady heyday.
For Joseph Quartana — who once ran Seven New York, an influential boutique founded in 2000 that was dedicated to championing emerging fashions — AsFour’s designs were an organic fit alongside budding names like Raf Simons and Haider Ackermann. While those designers would go on to superstar careers that “shaped global fashion,” as Quartana observed, those at AsFour seemed mired in their IYKYK status, avatars of an indie scene that would vanish sooner than anyone could have predicted.
“AsFour epitomized this totally design-centric approach, which unfortunately in this day and age has gone entirely out of vogue,” Quartana said.
In a sense, the AsFour designers (which became threeASFOUR after Kuhne left the group in 2005 in a rancorous professional divorce) stood as standard-bearers for what Quartana termed “predigital, pre-smartphone and precancel culture.” They represented a scrappier New York that flourished before chain stores routed out small-scale retail and fresh-faced influencers snapping matcha latte selfies replaced bleary club kids teetering home at dawn.
They were — and substantially remain after nearly three decades — designers committed to vision before branding. That vision, for designs rooted in study of the human form, although inspired by abstruse cosmic concepts and rigid geometries, is a tough fit for an industry dominated by logos and multinational labels. And that, as much as anything, gives reason to cheer the theatrical release this week of “threeASFOUR: Full Circle,” an affectionate yet cleareyed documentary about the group by Sean Ono Lennon, making his feature directorial debut alongside Brian C. Gonzalez as co-director.
The documentary tracks the vicissitudes of the three over a five-year period as they navigated a changing business and city, struggling to survive despite shifts in taste and a radically altered commercial landscape. Dutifully marking the many plaudits the designers have accumulated over the years, the documentary does not stint on the downside.
After a long stretch of tepid sales and mounting debts, the collective was evicted from its storied Manhattan loft and was rescued by an 11th-hour offer to relocate to New Jersey. Understating the case, perhaps, Asfour remarks in the film that the survival of designers like threeASFOUR — quirky, cerebral and innovative — is in serious peril, although, just as with threatened animal species, by the time they are designated endangered, it may be too late for salvation.
“My initial feeling was the film would be about what does it mean to make such beautiful work and not be viable according to the system,” Lennon said. “I related to that struggle personally since I’ve been making music for decades and never had any commercial success. Why do we make work if we are pushing a boulder up a hill?”
If the documentary leaves the question unresolved, it does create “a very rich late ’90s and early 2000s cultural story,” as Lennon noted. In common with other recent films about the generation of designers that emerged during a particularly robust period in New York — Gonzalo Hergueta’s 2025 documentary, “The Designer Is Dead,” about Miguel Adrover comes to mind — the threeASFOUR story centers on immigrant experiences.
“One answer to why we stay together is to promote a message that is beyond making clothes,” Donhauser said one recent afternoon at the collective’s Jersey City headquarters, a light-filled loft at Mana Contemporary, a contemporary arts complex inside the converted hulk of a 1920s tobacco warehouse.
But for the gray in Asfour’s wiry mane, the members of threeASFOUR seem to have escaped time’s predation. Buzzing around the large loft space where interns were busily assembling garments and Powder’s successor, a poodle named Rumi, leaped onto and off an upholstered banquette, they seemed little changed from the firebrands this reporter first encountered two decades ago.
Now in their 50s, Donhauser and Gil continue to wear their hair skinned back in girlish side ponies. At 60, Asfour still radiates adolescent energy. “People ask why we stay together,” he said. “We try to ask that question to ourselves. Why? What am I doing?” Faith and love, he said, is as close as he comes to an answer.
There is something else. As the film makes clear, the members of threeASFOUR are part of the diaspora of those who, outsiders in their homelands, went out into the world in search of belonging. Asfour, Christian Palestinian by ancestry, was raised in Lebanon and fled after compulsory military service. Gil, a lifelong spiritual seeker, recognized early that she could never find personal peace in her native Israel. Donhauser, born in the Soviet Union, was largely raised in Germany, both of which places the film depicts as eternally gray.
Far from being budding cultists, they were following a route map left behind by all of those who ever fantasized escape from lives with no prospect for the promise of bright lights and big cities. “The places we come from, the different backgrounds we had, brought us together and brought us here,” Donhauser said.
Their unconventional route guided them to a city “where there was so much wonder and no one had a plan,” she added. It also led to a shared aesthetic whose origins could be found not on mood boards but in Spirograph drawings or computer-generated patterns based on elements of tile patterns shared among religions: Christianity, Judaism, Islam.
Connection was among the putative messages put forth by AsFour in its heyday. And it remains at the center of the work threeASFOUR displayed during New York Fashion Week, when it made a return to the show schedule after a long hiatus. As with much else in its style canon, the clothes it sent onto the runway remained stubbornly offbeat, eccentric enough for doubters to question both the messaging and its commercial viability.
“You wonder whether it’s all just a pretty picture and a reflection of this totally late-’90s indie movement that was probably the last moment of New York cool,” Eugene Rabkin, the founder of the fashion and culture platform StyleZeitgeist, said of the group.
Whether or not that is the case, what makes Lennon’s film affecting is exactly how well it captures the essence of a gritty period and its attendant cool, framing AsFour (and, later, threeASFOUR) as unwitting emblems of downtown hip before “hype and the vultures devoured it,” as Donhauser said.
“Until I made the film, I had no idea how lucky I was to live through New York in the ’90s or early 2000s,” Lennon said. “When there’s this golden era in culture and you’re around it, you don’t appreciate it as it’s happening. I never realized how a much colder, more corporate version of everything could take over. I see that now.”
