Photo: Anne Rhett
Dubbed “Sky Floral,” the illustration is splashed across a series of white and powder blue silk faille dresses in eight silhouettes, all featuring playful elements that wink to Alexia Maria’s designs; scattered throughout the floral pattern are dainty bow-ribbons that evoke Victorian nightgowns.
When it came to their collaboration, Alexia María selected silhouettes (including her fan favorite, bow-backed Margaret dress) for Fishwick to enliven with her prints—but the rest of the brief was, more or less, carte blanche. “She really wanted it to feel fresh,” says Fischwick. “She said, ‘Bring in a bow if you can—I want it to feel sort of like Marie Antoinette, the Sofia Coppola film.’ Very feminine, but with a little bit of an edge, a little bit of unexpectedness—for me, in my work, that can get weird, but I kept things pretty here.”
Fishwick did manage to find a way for the bows to complement her floral prints, though, most of which are based on studies of dahlias and blue poppies she pulled from public domain archives and pattern books and then collaged together. “It’s easier to incorporate a small print onto a dress,” Fishwick continues, referencing some of her prints for Hill House Home. “I laugh whenever I talk about this, but a lot of times you’re doing a larger, symmetrical pattern, it can look like lungs or another body part so we kept it asymmetrical.”