“It’s nice to sell a woman a dress, but let’s do more than that,” beams JJ Martin in the Acqua di Parma store on Via Gesù. Martin has set up shop in the boutique to show her fall 2020 collection and to fete a collaboration with the fragrance brand that sees her lending her eye for packaging, a bit of store design, and a seaside capsule collection of maillots, pillows, towels, paroes, and notebooks to complement the Blu Mediterraneo scent. And that’s not even the “more than that” which Martin really wants to offer her customers. Instead, past the perfumes, is the heart of her fall 2020 collection: a series of artworks themed around “raising your vibration.”
The idea started when Martin came across the collage work of Australian artist Claire Johnson on Instagram. A couple of WhatsApp messages were traded before Martin settled on bringing Johnson into her world. Both have a rich spiritual practice and connected through the bright colors and retro shapes in each other’s work. On the wall in the store hang renditions of Johnson’s motivational collages, and on Martin’s dresses are abstractions of Johnson’s prints. A dove carries from the corner of a collage into an allover design on a dress, a collage motif highlights the placket of a long shirtdress. In total, Martin and her team designed 10 custom prints this season, their most ever. Having that much control over their materials—Martin started her brand with 100% vintage fabrics and has slowly lessened that percentage over the years—allows for even more experimentation, even more joie de vivre to be spiced into short dresses, and flippy dresses, and bodacious dresses, and full on tented tunic dresses.
The shocker here is Martin’s solids. A merlot dress is offered as a reprieve from the horror vacui of the La Double J world. Other patterns are given breathing room too, like a cornflower and burgundy dove print or an optic white and black gridded wool. Martin can always do more—this season alone, she has also launched her own crossbody iPhone bags, a collaboration with Valextra, expanded her Goddess range of pillows and dresses, and developed six new fabrics, all while soft launching jewelry—but the most exciting development here is how fantastic, exuberant, and easygoing a La Double J piece that does less can be.
