“The silhouette evokes a sense of the seasons, a mysterious charm, a woman living,” reads a t-shirt in Stella Ishii’s pre-fall collection at 6397. The quote, designer Lizzie Owens explains, has been extrapolated from Martin Margiela: In His Own Words, the documentary on the elusive designer Ishii was interviewed for. It’s a proper description of Margiela’s oeuvre, surely, but also aligned with what Ishii and her team have built at this very New York label.
“It is about a woman living, that’s it,” chimed Judy Collinson, who joined Ishii’s team earlier this year. The four women, Collinson and Ishii together with Owens and Jenny Smith, now design the collections practically by committee. A showroom appointment at The News is more of a roundtable discussion than the standard tour through a clothing rack. The result of this dynamic is, in the case of this collection, a nuanced assortment that considers the many ways and places in which a woman—at any given point in her life—wears her clothes.
Here, Owens challenged herself to consider only natural textiles. Doing away with synthetics, the team explained, meant thinking about fabrics differently, particularly as it pertains to giving materials like cottons and silks a bit of body through texture. Ishii boiled a pinstripe wool before it was cut into plush tailoring, and a weightless silk slip had embroidered polka dots that gave the piece more shape. The latter was one of a fantastic run of dresses that felt like new territory for 6397, with a particular standout being a jersey sheath featuring a curved seam at center front. “We did more dresses this season, and the rule is that they had to look good over pants,” said Owens. Such are the kind of idiosyncrasies that keep 6397 special.
