Natasa Cagalj is a designer who believes in allowing her experiences as a woman, a mother, and a friend to other women to inform the way she designs. The ideas for the collection she put together for Spring started, she related—while pulling out an oversize poplin top, printed with circles and flowers—when she was on the beach in Croatia this summer. “These are the simple potato prints my children made on holiday,” she said. “I’m half Croatian, half Slovenian, and used to spend four weeks on the beach every year in Croatia as a girl—I always used to bring ribbons and tape and paper and paints with me to make things, just to stop myself being bored.” She smiled. “So now it’s a family tradition that me and my sister and all our children always do the same thing every year.”
The sense of a lifestyle, craftiness, and do-it-yourself resourcefulness ran through the collection, which was based around building a wardrobe of pinstriped shirting pieces, pants, knitwear, soft tailoring, and dresses. Cagalj, whose studio is in London, says she’d like to take the stress out of dressing for busy women who have work, family, and business travel to contend with. “I had this thought of how nice it would be to go to bed in your hotel room in your pajamas and bathrobe and maybe just get up and go out in them!” How many fashion women in a zombie state of tiredness at the shows will relate to that?
