With all due respect to Mr. Burt Bacharach, a house is a home—if the one we’re talking about is House of Aama, the label designed by mother-and-daughter duo Rebecca Henry and Akua Shabaka. For spring 2026 they crafted Folk Grounds, a gorgeous, lyrical, floral-sprigged, block-striped, and lacy ode to Gilbert Henry and his wife, Faye (Henry’s parents and Shabaka’s grandparents), and their homestead in South Carolina. Mr. Henry had lived there since childhood, growing up in a family that had sharecropped cotton and tobacco.
That led the designers to think about another Henry, John Henry, a folk hero who in the mid-19th century, so lore has it, challenged himself to work faster than the new steam-powered rock drills. He wanted to show that he could do the job as well as—in fact better than—these new drills that threatened the livelihoods of those who’d previously done the work by hand. In the end John Henry won the contest, but of course the story is really about how no human being, whoever they are, is expendable or replaceable. The same dignity of life and the love in it is in Henry and Shabaka’s tender remembrance of their family and how home is a place that’s always with us.
“We really wanted to think about the worlds our family created and bring them into the modern world,” said Shabaka backstage just before their show, which was held on the sun-flooded top floor of the Nine Orchard hotel on New York’s Lower East Side. (With the glorious NYC weather, fortune shone—literally—on them, given they’d opted to show in natural light.) “My grandmother was an archivist, and she left so many scrapbooks of our family’s lives, hundreds of them,” Shabaka went on to say. “As we looked through them while we were working on the collection, it became about design as memory.”
History and narrative, emotion and connection—they’re the stock-in-trade for the House of Aama duo. It’s why their storytelling is worth repeating. Their clothes are grounded in something tangible, even if it’s a personal remembrance. This is not a brand about the Tumblr-style mood board of zeitgeisty research images, changing as quickly as work on the next collection begins. Folk Grounds, then, paid homage to homespun everyday fabrics: wallpaper-y florals, gingham checks blown up for graphic impact, the intricacy of lace that’s been kept, revered, and handed down from generation to generation. Many of the ideas for the textiles, some of which Henry said they’d developed themselves, came with those scrapbooks.
Henry and Shabaka worked within the idiom of early-to-mid-late 20th-century silhouettes: the sartorial span of a life, in other words, in shades of candy pink, lime green, celadon, and yellow. Dresses featured strongly: neat waisted frocks for home or work; ruffled, romantic styles, the frills tracing across them in step with their delicate flowers, for going out; and diaphanous, kind of 1970s-diva numbers for big nights. There were lingerie-inspired petticoat dresses, delicate blouses, and lingerie shorts, too, all worn with frilly, bejeweled shoes in sugared almond colors, the kind of footwear that might be kept in their boxes under the bed and brought out only for special occasions. (Or maybe that was just my family growing up.)
The menswear was strong and appealing. It drew on a utilitarian theme, with engineer-striped overalls, camp shirts, and workwear pants, all of it enlivened by wit and whimsy: map prints of old sea journeys, an imaginary logo for Camp Aama, and (my favorite) a knit vest with an intarsia of a male figure from the back, perhaps Gilbert or John Henry, walking along a rail line across a bucolic sunlit landscape.
Henry and Shabaka’s approach to what they do underscores the idea that their clothes are meant to stick around—to be made part of your life, to be worn and loved and treasured. (It also makes sense that they don’t show every season, preferring to wait until there’s a proper story to tell.) If one had a little quibble about anything, it might be that the collection—in the show, at least—could do with some judicious editing and a speedier runway walking tempo. Even if they made those small changes, neither would detract from the charm and resonance of their always thoughtful, special work.
