Say hello to the perfect, pretty, travel-ready summer wardrobe. Launched today, it’s the result of the unexpected pairing of indie designer Maryam Nassir Zadeh and the purveyors of prep at J.Crew. Carefully edited, the capsule includes unique designs as well as iterations on MNZ best sellers. (A tiny tote, once in silk, was remade in mesh, for example.) Everything is easy, basic-but-not-quite, and almost asking to be thrown into a carry-on and whisked away.
In fact that’s exactly what Olympia Gayot, J.Crew’s creative director and head of design, did when she recently went on vacation. “It’s linen and it’s slip dresses; it’s meant to be wrinkled, it’s meant to be packed,” she enthused about the collection on an unusually glamorous Zoom. On one screen was Gayot and a mood board that looked like a sunkissed page of one of the company’s famed catalogs come to life; on the other was Zadeh on a rooftop in a bikini. The designer happened to be in New York City, but it could have been Paris or Greece, or any other of the fabulous places she regularly visits. Her peripatetic lifestyle has deeply informed her clothes, which carry with them fragrance of escapism and the dream of travel.
Among the qualities that make Zadeh’s “little nothings” look like quite something indeed is their almost unreal lightness, which is very much in evidence here. A bias-cut slip dress looks like it could be slid through a wedding ring, while a metallic knit bikini might as well be body paint, it’s so finely stitched. “I feel with MNZ and my spirit, there’s a sense of etherealness and rawness, and I love clothes that have longevity. It’s interesting that what we made [with J.Crew] has a strength to it,” said Zadeh.
