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| Batsheva Hay on outfitting Chloe Fineman for Maya Singer’s Unhinged: “I’m used to producing, making garments and putting on fashion shows. But an actual scripted piece - it was very interesting to me how much work went into it.” Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
In 2018/19 Batsheva Hay's clothes found their way onto Jacqueline Durran's costume design inspiration board for Greta Gerwig’s Little Women (for which Durran won her second Oscar after Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina starring Keira Knightley).
On the opening weekend of her newly launched shop Batsheva spoke with me about the clothes designed by Oscar-winner Holly Waddington for Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon (costumes by the multiple Oscar-nominated Jacqueline West), Maya Singer and Morgan Spector’s Mother!!, starring Rebecca Hall and the directors, featuring dresses by Batsheva and a dangerous sourdough (a highlight of the 20th edition of the Tribeca Film Festival With/In programme of Covid-themed shorts), and working on Unhinged, starring SNL’s Chloe Fineman (in a wide spectrum of the designer’s magnificent outfits) at Pardon My French on Avenue B in New York City.
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| Batsheva Hay on the costumes worn by Oscar-winning actress Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things: “That was definitely very inspiring.” |
Curtains (as also revealed in Alexandre O Philippe’s Lynch/Oz about David Lynch’s fascination with The Wizard Of Oz) and the work of artist Colette Lumiere were inspiration for Batsheva’s first-ever store, that feels as though you entered into an enchanted other world. A coatrack conjures up Jean Cocteau’s La Belle Et La Bête.
The casting in her Fall/Winter 2024 fashion show with models all over the age of 40 addresses questions of visibility and representation that also plague Hollywood and women on screen. Molly Ringwald, most recently seen as Joanne Carson in Feud: Capote Vs.The Swans, opened the show.
There is a curious transporting effect when you try on Batsheva’s garments. Actors often speak about how a costume or a shoe helps them to find a character. There is a Purple Rose Of Cairo effect of blurring boundaries. Joan Didion’s analysis of her longing for John Wayne to build her a house “at the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow” is closer to the core of these clothes, than commercialised escapist prairie or princess fantasies could ever be. The nostalgia is seen through a mirror slightly cracked, and never loses sight of the present.
Memories of moments when while leaving a cinema you carried some of the heroine or hero’s swagger and allure with you onto the street may suddenly come to mind, as the work of Batsheva resembles wearable cinema.
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| Rebecca Hall wearing Batsheva in Maya Singer and Morgan Spector’s Mother!! |
Anne-Katrin Titze: I love what you’re wearing! It’s very costume drama [and turns out to be for a Purim party later that day].
Batsheva Hay: It’s very costume-y, exactly. It’s not always the thing that sells the best.
AKT: Over the years there were outfits many people didn’t dare to wear, in shapes especially, and also fabric, that you gave us permission to wear.
BH: Thank you!
AKT: It was 2019, I think, when we had our first conversation.
BH: It was.
AKT: You mentioned then that period costume dramas were the films you liked the most. How is it now? Do you still get inspiration from films?
BH: I definitely do. I mean it was funny, everyone was like, you have to see Poor Things!
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| Batsheva Hay: “One of the inspirations I had was the work of Colette Lumiere, the artist. She would create entire rooms in shirred fabric, ruffled fabric.” Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: Because of the shoulders?
BH: Because of the sleeves! That was definitely very inspiring. But really any period.
AKT: What did you think of Poor Things?
BH: I thought it was great. It was wonderful, I really appreciated it.
AKT: Any other films that you’ve seen recently that you liked?
BH: I’m trying to think.
AKT: You must have been really busy setting up the shop.
BH: I know, I’ve been so busy, it hasn’t been such a big film time for me. But even Killers Of The Flower Moon, I loved the commitment there to that time period and that culture. I thought that was amazing.
AKT: These are two of my favourites, too, from last year. And in both the costumes were terrific. You did with Maya Singer a short film called Unhinged two years ago. Will there be another Batsheva film? What you are doing suits film so well!
BH: Making a film, even a short, is just so much work of so many different parts. I think I wasn’t really used to having that many components have to come together to produce. I’m used to producing, making garments and putting on fashion shows. But an actual scripted piece - it was very interesting to me how much work went into it. But Maya Singer, she is one of my dear friends and she is a filmmaker so we keep on thinking of other fun ideas, at least for shorts.
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| Batsheva Hay: “We drilled a little cane into to make it a little surrealist and we put a wicker head on top and flowers and painted it all.” Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: You should! Unhinged is very amusing and original. I interviewed Maya for Mother!!
BH: Oh cool!
AKT: And Morgan Spector as well.
BH: They wore a lot of my clothes! It was like a pandemic film. I’m close with Rebecca Hall and Maya and it was quite funny. It kind of worked also with the whole creepy domestic world there and my clothing. It helped that we are friends
AKT: It was clearly one of the best shorts in that series, the ultimate sourdough horror movie! I spoke with some directors in this series at the Tribeca Film Festival, and definitely noticed your clothing in this one. Your brand new store - where we are sitting right now - is two days old and it feels equal parts cinematic and like a jewellery box.
BH: That was the idea. I knew that the space was going to be small, because that’s just the constraints of finding a store in New York in downtown. I wanted to make it feel special. The whole jewellery box feel comes from the use of shirred fabric all over. That came just from me thinking, well I work with fabric and I’m not used to decorating spaces really, I’m not an interior decorator. But I thought, what if I use what I work with? That’s when I knew I wanted to work with a lot of fabric.
AKT: It has a theatricality to it.
BH: The curtains!
AKT: Yes, the curtains! I recently watched the documentary Lynch/Oz about David Lynch’s fascination with The Wizard of Oz and how it inspired his filmmaking.
BH: Oh cool!
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| Poor Things Oscar-winning costume designer Holly Waddington at the New York Film Festival Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
AKT: There is a lot of mystery pertaining to curtains. They have a sheltering aspect in here. You feel very protected.
BH: You do, and it’s funny because the first colour I wanted to use was pink, but then I was like, it’s going to look too much like a womb. So I thought I actually have to make it a sort of unnatural colour, to make it not look like it literally looks so bodily. But it does almost have that kind of closed-in feel.
AKT: Did you test it?
BH: I pulled different fabrics - and was like, oh wait, that’s very bodily! One of the inspirations I had was the work of Colette Lumiere, the artist. She would create entire rooms in shirred fabric, ruffled fabric. And she often used pink. And that very much looked very human.
AKT: You chose red for the ceiling!
BH: That was a funny first decision because the ceiling has a character and is this kind of messed up New York ceiling and we thought, well, we can hide it or we can actually just make it glossy and red.
AKT: And the air conditioner is painted too, which is great!
BH: Yeah, that’s the constraints, you need a heater/AC and we were like, just paint it too.
AKT: It has a fire engine quality - the New York-ness becomes even more New York.
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| Anne-Katrin Titze in her Batsheva Zebra dress Photo: Ed Bahlman |
BH: We had to have the air conditioner so we decided to drop the ceiling and then it became this kind of funny layered space because of it. Same with the floor, like the leopard goes up on the sides because we needed to have outlets and we didn’t want those to have fabric.
AKT: The leopard with the blue is so you, it’s incredible.
BH: Yeah, I love every piece of it, really. We just approached each thing - and by we I just mean me and my friends who helped with it - like, what do we do with the floor? That’s so cool - I found this print - and I love that it’s blue - what colour do we choose for this? - you know, just all these little decisions came together. Even this piece [she points to the embellished coatrack] in the middle that’s just a wooden coatrack that we drilled a little cane into to make it a little surrealist and we put a wicker head on top and flowers and painted it all.
AKT: Jean Cocteau I’m thinking with this piece.
BH: Yeah.
AKT: It’s La Belle et la Bête, Beauty and the Beast in one. What about these bags? Are they inspired by anything?
BH: You know, I don’t know. I made one so long ago, it felt to me like a little Venetian pouch, like an Origami-type thing and I just keep on making them with scraps of fabric or something that I’m using for something else. I love the idea of having just a fabric pouch with a drawstring. I have them in vintage fabric and sequins and everything.
AKT: In your last show [opened by Molly Ringwald] all the models were over 40. How did the idea come about?
BH: Truly it just came to me one day that I thought that would be it. I mean every time that it’s time for fashion week, I’m like, I don’t know if I should do a show or what I should do. When that idea came to me it felt very easy and it gave a structure to everything so much to just have it be about a different vision of the women on the runway.
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| Batsheva Hay on a new direction: “Well, I think that I am more dressing and experimenting with looser shapes and mixing things.” |
It honestly just made me feel more confident too, because since turning 40 recently, it’s just been such a different point of view on things. That feeling of you are kind of getting pushed out of like the main world of fashion. Which is just so insanely obsessed with the 20-year-old woman in this unnatural way. So that felt really fun and also gave me a way to cast people on my own with this vision.
AKT: The world is going into such a strange direction. On the other side you have the ten-year-olds at Sephora.
BH: Yes, totally!
AKT: You would think, that it’s high time for an embrace of people being older. But social media is even more enforcing these youth notions.
BH: Absolutely. It’s crazy. I also was so surprised that the response was so great to it. I wasn’t expecting that.
AKT: The New York Times article, wow!
BH: That was so good, right? And there were so many other things, so much press started to come out of it. So that’s been unexpected too that people would react with love and embrace it so much.
AKT: Because it is planted in our heads - now at this or that age, I can’t wear certain clothes anymore. And you have always with your clothing addressed that. Certain dresses one might think of as, oh no I can’t wear that because I liked this as a six-year-old, how can I wear it as an adult?
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| Batsheva Hay on the costumes by Jacqueline West for Martin Scorsese’s Killers Of The Flower Moon: “I loved the commitment there to that time period and that culture. I thought that was amazing.” |
BH: Totally.
AKT: But you have this joy and embrace of all that. Just the deer and the cars on the fabrics of your dress - there lies a kind of enjoyment that some mind police tells us not to have.
BH: Yes, absolutely. So I think that is definitely true and that is how I started my brand. It was just like, why can’t I be adventurous still and have fun and a sense of humour and all that. And then for this last show where I was casting older women I was kind of a little bit playing with what is an aging version of this or an older version of this? Or can I play with more of a dignified feeling? So I did a lot of shapes that were less childish and more things like hoods that felt dignified but also like fun.
AKT: It makes you think, because what we wear is also always a question of the mind. Where do restrictions come from? Why is something not for you? All these questions - there is a lot to sartorially uncover. You had a show take place in a law school [Batsheva used to be a lawyer], so these thoughts are very much on your mind, aren’t they? The philosophy behind the garments?
BH: Absolutely! I’m also figuring out how I want to dress and that changes too and then I start to kind of question it and examine it too.
AKT: Is there a new direction that you see for yourself?
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| Batsheva is on 166 Elizabeth Street in New York City Photo: Anne Katrin Titze |
BH: Well, I think that I am more dressing and experimenting with looser shapes and mixing things. I mean today I am wearing one of my old dresses - but more like denim jackets on things. I don’t know, I am always playing around because I am always looking to try a different feeling out. Not as much print as when I started. When I started everything was all print. And now there’s quite a bit of black. There’ll always be print.
AKT: That zebra behind you is also one of the earlier ones, isn’t it?
BH: Yes, exactly.
AKT: I remember it. I love it and may have to try it on! Thank you!
BH: Amazing, thank you!
Batsheva is on 166 Elizabeth Street.
