How Kari Fry Built Subsurface Through Trial by Fire

When Kari Fry talks about Subsurface, the fashion brand she founded in 2020, there’s a quiet confidence to her words. She’s chatting to me from her Los Angeles-based studio, speaking with a very non-Los Angeles curiosity and calmness. It’s not what I expected from such a provocative brand based around, as she puts it, “not being risk averse.” I quickly learn that Kari’s background stems neither from California, nor fashion. “I have no fashion experience. I majored in psychology from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. Everything I’ve learned has been self-taught. Before I started the brand, I was doing work at an experiential design agency. It’s all been learning by fire,” she admits.

Still, Kari always had an interest in fashion. Similar to many businesses, she started Subsurface to solve a problem. “The brand started with me thinking, ‘OK, these are pieces I want and can’t find anywhere.’” She eventually created a core collection of silk pieces that remain a staple for Subsurface, like her Ribbon Wrap skirt that is beautifully constructed with sleek and architectural lines that sit high on the waist. The silk designs have a futuristic elegance, where the focus is on revealing and concealing through precise cuts and strategic strapping. “We still sell and produce them—they do really well for us,” she adds.

Design inspiration often comes from Kari’s fascination with texture and how light interacts with different materials. Subsurface’s name itself is rooted in that concept. “The brand is named after subsurface scattering. It’s the way that light comes through material. If you were to Google it, you would see a photo of light coming through a hand. That kind of glowy feeling where if you hold your hand up in front of the sun, you see that the texture totally changes.” This focus on light and texture plays out across Subsurface’s collections. Her Liquid line, which features transparent pieces that shift with lighting, has become one of the brand’s best-sellers. “The collection is very transparent and looks totally different in depending on the lighting,” she says.

“The biggest goal is to make true, innovative art. It’s such a privilege.”

Subsurface has carved out a loyal niche but is still very much a small operation. “We’re a super small team—there are three of us, and two are part-time,” Kari says. That tight-knit structure comes with its own set of challenges, particularly when it comes to balancing creativity with the demands of running a business. “It’s been interesting to straddle the line between art and commerce for us,” she says. “To do that you need time and money, and what usually provides that is commerce. Sometimes you hit the sweet spot and sometimes you don’t. I’ve experienced both.” She’s candid about the difficulties of maintaining a brand as an independent designer. “It’s necessary to design things you want and are excited about, but it’s hard to run a self-funded, independent brand and still cover overhead,” she admits. “Sometimes things work organically, and sometimes they don’t.”

Design inspiration often comes from Kari’s fascination with texture and how light interacts with different materials. Subsurface’s name itself is rooted in that concept. “The brand is named after subsurface scattering. It’s the way that light comes through material. If you were to Google it, you would see a photo of light coming through a hand. That kind of glowy feeling where if you hold your hand up in front of the sun, you see that the texture totally changes.”

One of those organic successes came with Subsurface’s pearl pieces. “We did a full pearl set, and we’ve done a few custom pieces, but they start at $4,000—a higher barrier to entry and price point,” she says. The pieces weren’t intended to be the brand’s big seller, but they found an audience anyway, leading to smaller, more accessible accessories like chokers and belly chains. “Many of our pieces sort of hit the cusp between clothes and jewelry.”

Kari’s fearlessness in design also applies to her brand, where she cold-calls manufacturers and vendors to find the right partners, often from unexpected places. “That’s the thing about Midwesterners—we’re resourceful,” she says with a laugh. Kari has also managed to navigate the complicated world of online retail—you can find Subsurface on major websites like Revolve and SSENSE. “Those wholesale accounts took my business to the next level in terms of being really lucrative and having a bit of freedom,” Kari says. “We’ve done probably eight production shipments to Revolve this year already, and it is so time-consuming. Scaling is extremely difficult.”

Like many small brands, Kari relies on Instagram to reach her audience, but that hasn’t always been smooth sailing. She believes the platform favors larger accounts. “We’ve gotten shadow banned 100 times. Our account was completely deleted for a large part of this year. You see other people pushing the boundaries with the female body and voyeurism—sex sells—and they have no issues.” Even without a consistent presence on social media, Subsurface has found ways to reach its audience. “We do sell and reach our customers primarily through social media, but we have a few pieces that are selling passively without posting,” she says. Her introverted nature also plays a role in the brand’s quieter social media presence. “I would love to just lock myself in this room and design, make stuff with my hands, and not talk to anyone.”

That introversion has also influenced Kari’s approach to celebrity culture, another marketing channel she’s wary of. “Sometimes it’s hard being a small brand because you almost have to sell your soul, like giving free clothes to any celebrity just in hopes that they wear it. At the end of the day, that’s so much money and time, and it feels a bit flawed to me.” While she’s recently begun exploring more celebrity placements, she still feels conflicted. “I struggle playing the game,” she says. “It doesn’t feel good to me to send a bunch of pieces to a big name just to have them returned ripped.”

Despite her reservations, Subsurface has had its viral moments. Early on, the brand’s Hostess pant—featuring a thong detail—caught fire online. “I honestly made it for fun, not thinking anything of it,” she says. Inspired by Gillian Anderson’s red-carpet mishap in the early 2000s, the design was a playful nod to the fashion moment, but it quickly took off. “It really caught on and people loved it. They styled it in so many different ways, which was fun to see.”

The craftsmanship behind Subsurface is something Kari is proud of. She speaks enthusiastically about her clothing’s small details: the stitching, patterns, special materials, and the concepts behind them, like a recent set drawn from the myth of Cleopatra’s death. “The collection is inspired by a body being wrapped by a serpent,” she says, describing how the striations in the fabric mimic a snake winding around the wearer’s body. Produced in Umbria, Italy, the pieces are created using cutting-edge knitting machines. “They’re essentially the closest machines that man has made to printing out a garment,” she explains. “They’re really special. I literally draw where the striations should land and they get relayed, just like a printer.”

For Kari, this process is more than just fashion. “The biggest goal is to make true, innovative art,” she says. “It’s such a privilege.”

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Model: Jasmin Renken, The Rock Agency. Hair & Makeup: Tanya Renelt, The Rock Agency.