Chanel’s Matthieu Blazy isn’t the only one in a New York State of mind. Coincidentally, Caroline Bille Brahe just launched her own Big Apple–themed capsule.
The designer’s ties to the city run deep; she lived here for six years when she was modeling. One of her first memories of NYC dates to 2010 when Bille Brahe (then Brasch Nielsen) was booked for a career-making opportunity to appear in a Nicolas Ghesquière-era Balenciaga campaign photographed by Steven Meisel. “Every time I come there, it really brings me that memory of being young,” she say. Bille Brahe tied those memories up in a bow on an embroidered black cotton T-shirt depicting a beribboned Empire State Building and New Yorker Hotel building. On the back of a pale pink shantung coat, the Statue of Liberty holds a heart-shaped red balloon that reads CARO ❤ NYC. Milton Glaser’s beloved I ❤ NYC is reimagined in sequins. “I thought that it was really funny to kind of make it [have] a little bit of a touristy vibe in New York . . . [with] T-shirts like those you would buy in a souvenir shop.”
One of the designer s impetuses for doing something in New York is that her sister-in-law, the jeweler Sophie Bille Brahe, opened a shop here last year. The two are very close and Caroline admires the high-low mix that defines Sophie’s style, which includes piling on diamonds with a T-shirt and jacket. A similar dichotomy is at work in the capsule. Having introduced lace on daring dresses for spring, here Bille Brahe layers it over denim, and delights in “the contrast of that really expensive material with an everyday piece.” She achieves a similar contrast when inserting pieces from vintage silk into the seams of jean jackets. Tweed outlines the seams on some very dashing coats. The effect, notes Caroline, is “being fancy without being fancy.” Indeed, as carefully worked as the sequined denim pieces are, they seem particularly well suited for dashing around New York City, where grit is the counterpart to glamour.
“I love the energy—it’s always the energy of people going somewhere,” says Bille Brahe of her former home. “Everybody has a dream of something, so everybody in New York is working really, really hard. And I actually love that, I think many countries could actually learn from that energy of working really hard and having a dream and wanting something.”
The capsule is available on line here.
