Last season, 10 Crosby’s Kate Wallace introduced 10×10, a concept that places a new woman at the forefront of her collections each season. The idea, Wallace explained then, is to put “real woman” at the center of her output for the label. For fall, the woman in question is Laila Gohar, the Egyptian-born artist who uses food as her primary medium and was dubbed “the Björk of food” by The New Yorker.
“When the team and I started to conceptualize this collection, we created a narrative around our hero,” said Wallace, “and Laila embodies everything we were looking for in that woman as a business person, a creative, and an entrepreneur.” The lookbook was shot in Gohar’s home, and the artist’s own singular style helped put the clothes in context. Designers talk a lot about the ideal lives their customers live, but it’s not hard to believe that Gohar would lounge by her couch wearing a slinky dress featuring a melange of prints, or that she’d pair a classic pair of 10 Crosby jeans with a 1940s style floral jacquard jacket and black stockings and heels for a business meeting.
Apropos, the story of the collection was split into three parts of a “culinary journey.” First came a business luncheon, with an eclectic business casual sensibility; then an evening time rendez-vous, a little more seductive and moodier in tone; and finally what Wallace called “the aprés,” with saturated colors and playful fabrications and silhouettes.
Wallace has imbued 10 Crosby with a sense of romantic pragmatism. Even the mightiest of her commercial heavy-hitters have a little something that makes them special: Classic 10 Crosby jeans are top-stitched with white thread or cut in lurex denim; cashmere blazers and coats are made to be reversible; and linen trousers are treated with gold foil. She has also made sure to expand the limits of 10 Crosby by thinking of “wardrobing” not as a commercial brief but as an exciting daily date with oneself. A cool crackled leather trench or an equal parts kooky and sophisticated reversible mid-length white puffer jacket should make fun options for her woman to play around with as she gets dressed in the morning.