Batsheva Fall 2018 Ready-To-Wear....Fashionweekly..On Fow24news.com

Batsheva Hay’s dresses are unmissable. In ditsy, retro patterns and colors, the full-skirted, ruffle-trimmed pieces stand starkly apart from anything else you could find on a runway or in a store in 2018.....
An attorney by trade, Hay began making the cotton dresses as a hobby—she’s always loved Laura Ashley shapes and prints—and they quickly started to catch the eyes of people in the fashion industry. Her Fall 2018 collection was presented on an unassuming rack in the Tribeca restaurant Yves, where Hay’s friends and clients congregated at the bar, some wearing her pieces, others choosing more anonymous daywear.

This Fall’s collection is a continuation of the prairie-girl themes Hay has long loved. She explains her process as very intuitive—she just gravitates to the colors and shapes that appeal to her—adding that she took customer feedback into account as well. The crowdsourced advice resulted in button-down options “for the boob ladies,” longer and shorter lengths, and separates, so you could represent the cult of Batsheva without giving up jeans.

These impossibly pretty, delicate dresses could also seem impossibly irrelevant in “times like these,” when fashion is trying to suss out ways to represent the complexity of womanhood through clothing. Hay’s work, with its modesty, frill, and super-saccharine femininity, can be read as regressive. So how to classify or categorize these pieces, which are, in fact, beloved by New York’s most fiercely intellectual and politically minded women? It’s about the freedom to choose and the freedom to reclaim notions of girlishness and prettiness to represent strength. You have to ask yourself when wearing a Batsheva dress, “Do I dare to wear a ruffle?” In the age of Everlane, a ruffle is practically revolutionary. Lots of women are rising to the cause.