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.
