Mira Mikati is her florist’s best customer. “It makes or breaks my day, so I go early in the morning two or three times a week before Pilates class,” the designer said over tea at Toraya during Paris Fashion Week. She paused a beat, and added: “Once I am done with fashion, maybe I will open a flower shop with a Japanese tea place and sweets, because we don’t have that in London.”
Until Café Mira takes shape, the designer offered up a flowerbed of a collection for spring. Blooms sprouted in 3D on sweaters, a belt, and a white sundress; as sequined pansies on jammies; as bouquets of hollyhock, daisies, anemones, and magnolias arranged herbarium-style on a “Fleuriste” sweatshirt featuring some of her perennial favorites; and as negative space as laser cut-outs on a grass green shorts and top ensemble. A denim jacket had a flower stall embroidered on its back, and even a trench coat had little patches of flowers, butterflies, hearts, and clouds.
Mikati is leaning into knitwear this season, for example a handmade crochet cardigan with patches or a joyful mashup of rainbow stripes, as on a rainbow skirt turned on the bias with beaded straps (“when it’s high quality, even when it’s hot you don’t fry,” she noted). Also kawaii: an orange cashmere sweater embroidered with a little bunny wagashi like the ones served over at her favorite meeting spot in Paris. But it was the back of one striped shirt that best summed up the Mikati way of life: “Stay close to the people that feel like sunshine.”
With all this color swirling about, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Mikati has added a new hue for spring, showcased as an otherwise unadorned sundress in the very last image here. “I’ve never used red, but it’s starting to grow on me,” she said. “I find it glamorous and a really big statement, so for the first time I thought, why not?” That was the kind of one-and-done piece that makes vacation packing a breeze.
