![]() ![]() ![]() This past September, a day after she presented a collection for New York Fashion Week in a Manhattan diner, where models wore hairnets and passed out milkshakes and fries, the online magazine Quartz declared that: “The fashion media is, frankly, batshit for Batsheva.” A profile in the New Yorker that same month described her style as “both subversive and coveted”. ‘It’s possible to argue that without his religious odyssey, her second career as one of New York’s most heralded designers might never have happened.’ Photograph: Madison McGaw/BFA/REX/Shutterstock “I didn’t even have a business Instagram at that point.”īack to his roots: Batsheva with her husband. “I just went to their hotel room with my four dresses and they ordered a bunch,” she says. Intrepid buyers for a Japanese store quickly noticed her work, and got in touch. It was a 35th birthday present to herself, but when friends asked her to make dresses for them, too, she began posting photos to her Instagram account. The leap from wearing vintage dresses to using them as a basis for her cut-and-paste sensibility came in 2016, when Batsheva took a corduroy floral dress she’d found to a dressmaker, altering the shape to make the sleeves puffier, the waistline higher, and using vintage fabrics she found online. It’s the home of people who don’t care much for material possessions. Hanging on a wall is the 10 Commandments etched on to a wooden tablet, among the few concessions to decor. A dead rose sits forlornly in a Mason jar. “I’ve worn Laura Ashley my whole life,” she says breezily, as she pulls her feet on to the sofa in the modest New York apartment she shares with Alexei and their two children, Ruth and Solomon. She had the sheets, the bedspreads, the sailor dresses, even the straw hats bedecked with ribbons. The clothes felt like an extension of the school plays she enjoyed performing in. As a child, she took pleasure in the label’s exaggerated romanticism, its whiff of theatricality. But fashion has an extraordinary ability to quote from its greatest hits while simultaneously subverting them. For Brits who can still recall the era, Laura Ashley’s floral froufrou, like Aga stoves and pot pourri, often felt like accessories for a lifestyle preoccupied with a certain kind of status, exemplified by a Cotswold cottage furnished with chintzy wallpaper and fabrics. If, like others, you too have consigned Laura Ashley to punchlines about 1980s consumer culture and class fetishism, Hay may give you reason to think again. ![]() Photograph: Andrew H Walker/WWD/REX/Shutterstock The frill seeker: Hay at the Vogue Fashion Fund Awards ceremony in New York in November 2018. “And he’s also happy to provoke people, and say something that makes them uncomfortable. “Alexei has to really believe in something and take it to the nth degree,” explains Batsheva. Like the scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen morphs into a caricature of a rabbi at the dinner table of Diane Keaton’s all-American family, it forces others to examine their uneasiness. In an industry constipated by the relentless demands of holding the right pose, it even feels radical. We looked like such an odd couple.”īonkers though it may seem, it takes a certain kind of confidence to turn up to photograph someone like Prince Harry for Town & Country, or Sarah Jessica Parker for the cover of Bazaar – two of Alexei’s many commissions – dressed in full Hasidic garb. “He just rolled like that for a while, and meanwhile I was wearing leggings and T-shirts. “It was crazy.” She scrolls through her iPhone to find photos of Alexei in his full beard, black fedora and plain black suits – and giggles. “He literally threw everything away, and went to a tailor in Williamsburg and just had 10 Hasidic suits made and started wearing those to photo shoots,” she recalls. Those clothes had been worn around other woman, and therefore had to go. ![]() Although brought up as a secular Jew, he’d recently turned to Orthodox Judaism, and wanted to purge his wayward past. Hay tried to save a few pieces, but Alexei would not be persuaded. “He had such cool clothing, really super stylish three-piece suits, things like that,” she recalled one recent afternoon as we sat in her apartment in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. S hortly after they were married, Batsheva Hay was startled to find her husband, the celebrated fashion photographer Alexei Hay, throwing out all his old clothes. ![]()
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