Batsheva Hay is in her daring, experimental era: for the past few seasons she has been pushing against the limits that delineate what her brand can be. “I have no classical fashion background, so I learned with cut-and-sew garments, and it was all handed off,” she explained. “I used to feel like I couldn’t work with the garments. I had to hand things over, then pick them up, and it was very nice for my lifestyle. Then I’d go home and nurse my baby and then hand her off, pick the clothes up, pick out the buttons or whatever.” She laughed at the familiar juggling of so many women who go home at the end of a workday for a different kind of work. “But now I find the really fun part is tearing things, shredding things, adding little bustles, pinning things onto things. And I do think that’s an important part of what distinguishes my brand from other brands; that there’s a little bit of naivete in it. It’s not quite feral, but just the amateurness of it all.” For sping-summer 2024, Batsheva went The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel with all the 1950s volumes and colours, but also in the sense of humor. These “grotesque experiments,” as Hay calls them, involved her pinning a surplus of cotton placemats and oven mitts that she had lying around. “I just started safety-pinning them on my body, and I thought, Oh, it’s so sexy,” While the oven-mitt dress feels very much like oven mitts that have been safety-pinned together when you’re just “being goofy,” the experimentation did take her to some groovy places. Like the dress made from delicately embroidered cotton placemats, which has a sort of romantic quality to it, and the top made from floral-print cotton placemats, which Hay draped over a white cotton “cheerleader full-circle skirt” with turquoise godets further propped up by a hoop skirt underneath. If it all sounds a little nutty, it is, but it also feels wearable and oddly accessible. Hay expanded, elongated, or otherwise stuffed some of her go-to silhouettes, like the turquoise dress modeled by Amy Fine Collins, which is one of her bestsellers, and the high-waist, pleated skirt in turquoise with embroidered kissy prints, which she makes every season in different fabrications. The designer was also having fun at her presentation inside the BondST restaurant at Hudson Yards, where models holding little number signs walked around guests, midcentury couture show style, while Hay narrated the looks and then opened the floor for questions and comments from the audience.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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