“The vibe is a little bit business—I’m really trying to be very practical.” Batsheva Hay wasted no time getting to the point of her resort collection. We were looking at a handsome, heavy black denim skirt suit that was typical Batsheva: a vintage-inspired batwing jacket with four small buttons and a tie at the waist, worn with a pencil skirt, both with matching white piping trim. In the look book, the model is wearing one of the designer’s signature button-down shirts with a ruffled collar. It was all a little Melanie Griffith in Working Girl. Ditto a ruffled-collar short-sleeve blouse (another one of her signatures), which she paired with another pencil skirt, both in a semi-sheer peach organza with yellow embroidered flowers. Remember when Griffith (as Tess McGill) says, “I’ve got a mind for business and a bod for sin”? That one’s like that.
“This whole season is like, Is it holiday, or is it vacation? So I did both.” For holiday: her classic metallic ruched skirts, slinky blouses and dresses, and oversized bows in both disco silver and liquid gold. For vacation: a series of caftans (“they’re my new obsession”) modeled after the one worn by Lori Belilove, the founder and artistic director of the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation & Company, when she opened Batsheva’s fall 2024 show back in February.
“She only dances in two shapes, and one of them is this rectangle,” Hay had explained at the time. They are all one of a kind. In the months leading up to her store opening in SoHo back in March, the designer had been “buying up all these vintage fabrics” as inspiration/decoration options for her space. “It’s really about being able to use bits of them here and there—I don’t need to find massive yardages,” she added. Two versions out of many she showed made it to the final look book: one with a yellow mustard bodice and a skirt in that peach silk-chiffon fabric with flowers, and another in a honeycomb-esque green plaid, paired with a homely green, lilac, and purple floral print. (Special caftans aside, most of her prints this season are black-and-white florals.)
“What I’m really leaning into is this one-of-a-kind thing,” Hay continued, showing a simple tan cashmere sweater embellished with crochet flower squares. The idea is to individually embellish each sweater with whatever comes to mind—“rhinestones, studs, crochet—to turn something that is produced in a group into something special.” This is also an effect of her recently opened store; now she has a place for her more creative pieces to live within the context of her own universe. “Nothing in this collection is my typical bestseller,” she added. “This is all a shift, something new.”
