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Say hello to the perfect, pretty, travel-ready summer wardrobe. Launched today, it’s the result of the unexpected pairing of indie designer Maryam Nassir Zadeh and the purveyors of prep at J.Crew. Carefully edited, the capsule includes unique designs as well as iterations on MNZ best sellers. (A tiny tote, once in silk, was remade in mesh, for example.) Everything is easy, basic-but-not-quite, and almost asking to be thrown into a carry-on and whisked away.
In fact that’s exactly what Olympia Gayot, J.Crew’s creative director and head of design, did when she recently went on vacation. “It’s linen and it’s slip dresses; it’s meant to be wrinkled, it’s meant to be packed,” she enthused about the collection on an unusually glamorous Zoom. On one screen was Gayot and a mood board that looked like a sunkissed page of one of the company’s famed catalogs come to life; on the other was Zadeh on a rooftop in a bikini. The designer happened to be in New York City, but it could have been Paris or Greece, or any other of the fabulous places she regularly visits. Her peripatetic lifestyle has deeply informed her clothes, which carry with them fragrance of escapism and the dream of travel.
Among the qualities that make Zadeh’s “little nothings” look like quite something indeed is their almost unreal lightness, which is very much in evidence here. A bias-cut slip dress looks like it could be slid through a wedding ring, while a metallic knit bikini might as well be body paint, it’s so finely stitched. “I feel with MNZ and my spirit, there’s a sense of etherealness and rawness, and I love clothes that have longevity. It’s interesting that what we made [with J.Crew] has a strength to it,” said Zadeh.
The collaboration between Zadeh and Gayot came about through an introduction by a mutual friend, but the J.Crew designer was already well acquainted with MNZ. “There’s something about Maryam’s designs that…really captures the spirit of being a woman,” Gayot offered. “There’s an energy and a femininity and a beauty to what she does…I don’t even know how to describe it because it’s such an emotional connection…. There’s a sense of this empowerment of femininity through ease. You want to be Maryam or you want to be all these girls that she dresses because it just looks so beautiful and effortless.”
The campaign, styled by Thistle Brown in Formentera, illustrates these values. There’s a family-feeling to the cast, who appear to be three loving sisters of varying age; one young enough to model the Crewcuts pieces that are part of the collaboration. “We’re a multi-generational brand,” noted Gayot, “so for me it’s this idea that our clothes are timeless and they’re ageless.”
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This capsule possesses the effortlessness that the fashion industry is ever chasing. It’s to be found in yoked skirts designed to be worn with pale pastel maillots with criss-cross spaghetti straps in back or a ruffled bikini top, and in peppy polka-dots, which are a point of commonality between the brands. Zadeh recalled that she used them in a 2017 collection), and Gayot said, “the polka dot is very much in J.Crew’s heritage.” She draws a line connecting Zadeh’s “sensibilities” with “the nostalgia that our brand has, and the memories, the timelessness, the sense of being natural and being on vacation and having a good time—the freedom of the spirit of the old catalogs from the ’80s and the ’90s.”
Adding a soupcon of boho into the mix are some embellished dresses and robin’s egg-blue embroidery at the hem of a pair of shorts. The pieces are familiar—“MNZ has such a DNA in timeless basics,” Zadeh noted, yet they are styled to have impact—to be a little extra. It could be something as simple as pinning a fabric rose into your hair or wearing a scrunchie as a bracelet or anklet to transform an outfit.
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Zadeh has hung on to J.Crew pieces acquired in her self-described southern Californian mall girl days of the ’90s. These days, she’s a strong advocate for personal style. As she puts it, “It’s literally about a love for clothes. When you wear them, you make memories in them and [they retain those] vibrations.” Which is a sentiment in sync with Gayot’s mission to “loosen” and “soften” things. “I think as women,” she said, “we feel confident when we’re comfortable; we also want to look great, but comfort is number one.”
From Zadeh’s perspective, Gayot’s J.Crew is playful. “You could imagine that J.Crew could be preppy and clean,” she noted, but “I feel like there’s a spicy element to [the brand]; it’s a combination of the timeless, but then the novelty [adds] spice. Olympia’s approach is doing something very her, but making it feel very low key and easy… and I think that is modernity [and] the way that people want to dress.”
Shop an edit of the collection and discover the full campaign, below.
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