Sarah Nsikak Is So Happy to Be Back in Bed-Stuy

The upcycling fashion designer Sarah Nsikak was expecting her first child, daughter Maleigha, whose pending arrival prompted the decision to move with her partner upstate to Kingston. “I wanted to be in nature, thinking I would want this bucolic life,” she says. But she soon realized “it’s very isolating. I kind of wish someone had said, ‘You need to stay here with your community.’” She moved back to Bedford-Stuyvesant in March. “I feel like New York is the kind of place you are embraced and loved and people pick up where you left off.” We did this interview sitting at her worktable, where she was showing me pieces of an old nightgown. “It was definitely hurting me to cut it,” she says, “and I remember what I was watching, when I did it, the documentary on Donyale Luna! She was her own moment and then she was gone.”