Is a review entirely objective? Hell no! Because #Friend. Not so long ago I was hanging out with fellow journo J.J. Martin in grimy Parisian cell-phone stores trying to buy top-up data SIMs, the faster to cover the shows. Then around 2014 she started muttering about launching a blog to cover all the cool local “babes” and “ladies”—as she put it—she’d encountered as an L.A. lady herself who moved to Milan for love 15 years ago. Oh, and maybe she’d sell some vintage (she’s vintage obsessed) on the side.
The website launched as La DoubleJ in 2015, and hey, it was good, an authentic translation of Martin’s inherently sunny aspect. Then in 2016, as an experiment, Martin launched a small capsule of four products: two lengths of dresses, a shirt, and a skirt in the kind of vibrantly sunny signora prints she adores. These sold. Digi-tycoon Ruth Chapman of MatchesFashion.com gave her a pep talk: Why not go all in?
“So I sat down with my husband and we talked about how to bump it up and take this seriously. It’s all coalesced over the past 18 months,” Martin said. Those four products have turned into many—outerwear, swimwear, knitwear, plates, tablecloths, furniture, and dresses, dresses, dresses. What started out as a direct-to-consumer model has changed as wholesalers took an interest, hence the shift to a seasonal collection structure.
I’m naturally predisposed to like this collection because I like Martin. However, the wildfire speed of her brand’s spread is evidence that many other people like it, too. This first Resort collection won’t change that: With the rare exception of the odd plain tiered dress or skirt in green or fuchsia, everything here is peppered with keepers from the archive of Mantero, the 150-year-old print house with which Martin works. Its eight-strong roster of inkjet printers have been inking overtime to produce her easy-to-wear, hard-not-to-look-at jackets, pants, and swimsuits (which when teamed with matching skirts make for a go-directly-from-pool-to-party option I can’t remember any other label offering), as well as dresses, dresses, dresses. They come in silk, nylon viscose, and cotton. Then there are the brocades, light to the touch but again with seriously zhoozh-y visual impact, in forgiving and almost Barbara Tfank–y tunic coats, plus more skirts, jackets, dresses, and super-cute shorts. Oh, and there’s a lovely golden plissé jacquard skirt and that knitwear and scarves and yoga tops . . .
As Martin puts it, these clothes are not designed in any way to be sexy. Oh, no. Yet they garner serious on-the-street attention thanks to the power of those prints. La DoubleJ is a happy, straightforward, by-women-for-women, for-its-type-affordable expression of personal serendipity. It’s going to be huge, babe.
