Several months before the pandemic hit, Luella Bartley and Katie Hillier took a hiatus from ready-to-wear, pooling their resources and time to focus on jewelry and building out the brand’s e-commerce platform. The move was well timed: Their conversation-starting paperclip earrings were perfectly fit for a life on Zoom and continue to be best-sellers.
This season Hillier Bartley makes a welcome return with a full offering, one that speaks to the intentional and considered approach to fashion these two longtime friends have been honing for years. Many of their most distinctive New Romantic and Glam Rock–inflected signatures are back, including their high-waisted denim pants, a much chicer riff on the oft maligned mom jean; the coolest in the bunch come printed with painterly zebra stripes or with their HG logo twinkling in rhinestones on the back pocket. Spiffy tailoring is very much part of the Hillier Bartley vocabulary as well, though for the pre-fall those sharp, lines tend towards a slightly more relaxed silhouette—think, a louche midnight-blue velvet robe coat, boxy prep-school-style blazers, and slouchy corduroy pants. With so much collective anxiety around the return of strict waistbands, those forgiving shapes offer the chance to ease back into the idea of suiting.
As always, the charming Briticisms in the collection come laced with cheeky and delightfully eccentric details—the school badge embroidered with Bartley’s lovely illustrations of orchids and the female form and the bag charms modeled on her high-heeled leg sculptures are both great examples. Furnished with gold paperclips and encrusted with crystals, their take on the penny loafer marks the brand’s first foray into footwear and are bound to be a hit when parties make their long-awaited comeback.
Hillier and Bartley enlisted the talents of young photographer Indigo Lewin to shoot the campaign that drops this winter. Bartley’s adorable teenage son Ned and daughter Stevie are among the cool kids they cast to model the brand’s oversized shirting and fantastic rugby tops, living proof that, thanks in part to a new generation, the divide that once separated a woman’s wardrobe from a man’s is dissolving for good.
