Lela Rose Celebrates NYFW | Fashion Week Journal

Lela Rose Celebrates NYFW | Fashion Week Journal

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"My motto is ' Match your drink to your dress,'" tells me as she gets ready to uncork a bottle of bubbles. Earlier today, she held her small, personal spring presentation inside chef Ignacio Mattos's Cafe Altro Paradiso. They served a light, quick lunch and a cocktail called Pretty in Peach: Blanco tequila, grapefruit juice, peach shrub, Peychaud's bitters, and a splash of soda.


All images by Kirby Calvin

As you've no doubt already guessed, the spring line is full of fruit-y peach tones as well as sunny yellows and rich, ocean-y blues. Once you know the Texas-born founder's credo, and the fact that she recently issued an entertaining book, full of gorgeous and meaningful table scapes, you can only imagine the dining tables and beautiful drinks that each season might inspire.

Today's affair, however, is relatively low-key. Relatively. Sunrise-colored, organically sculptural floral arrangements from the intimate runway show lined the table and artful little snacks sat at the ready. A member of the party came in with a stack of bright plates and a cake knife, and once the Champagne was flowing, a delicate grapefruit tart was divided and passed, and the precise tone of a well-deserved celebration came into full bloom.

Lela, wearing current season like the rest of her team, tells me she has a firm and really fun-spirited belief that fashion and food have a deep connection. She mentions a female chef friend whose food she always finds inspiration in, and remarks how the best food and drink can engage all the senses.

"Oh, you should have smelled our cocktail at the show today!"

It isn't that any particular season has an overtly food-related concept behind it, just that this is a lady who loves to cook, thrives as a hostess and "sees color, lives color, wears colors."

Her collections are made for an "entertaining lifestyle," she tells me, and we trade stories about the best themed dinner parties we've attended. She uses the word, "canapes," more than once, charmingly.

"Isn't it so much more fun when you're really dressed? Clothes make you happy and feel good and that's when you're really your best self," she says emphatically and definitively. With an intact Southern accent despite ten years in New York City, her inherited big-heartedness and enthusiasm has a no-nonsense bottom line-which, now that I think about it, is DNA she's given the brand, too.

As I sit with her to take a look at the spring collection boards (above), and at the current, pre-fall and fall looks that hang from silver bars in the room, she mentions that Lela Roses dresses and separates are clothes you can wear to work, and then switch around and spruce up before revisiting them on the best social engagement of the weekend or heading out to a martini hour.

And, if you're like the designer, they're clothes you can ride your bike across town in. No sooner does she mention her heels-and-handle bars morning routine than she's wheeling a bright red bicycle into the celebration/conference room to show me.

"I bike everywhere. People just smile at me-my skirt all billowy out to the side. It's so fun."

"She does it just like that," says one of her sales staff across the table, pointing to the bike and her party look.

"Unless it's raining," she concedes, laughing, "and then I wear a helmut so my hair doesn't get big."

In the next room some of the other staff are readying collection images for online coverage, and someone behind her calls out about an herb and a garnish. After bending down to let her dog Bobbin down, she turns to the table and hands me one of the tiny flowers from the olive bowl.

"You have to try this," she says, and flashes fashion's biggest, brightest down-home smile before another sip of wine.

Eat, drink, dress-love. It's definitely a way of life.

Explore: current season Lela Rose | all designer collections

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-Laura Cassidy

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