Pioneer women in NYC
Fashionable women are dressing in prairie dresses amidst nostalgia for old America, writes Chloe Malle
ON the Friday before the US Labour Day, Alexa Chung, the perennial “It” girl, Instagrammed a selfie wearing a floor-length, persimmon-coloured dress of her own design with ruffles at the neck and a darted bodice.
Her caption read: “A throwback Friday, if you will (to the 1800s).”
Silky and saloon ready, Chung’s ensemble seemed a fitting cap to a summer that has seen a resurgence of prairie chic.
Over the past six months it is as if the Donner Party has set out to brave the wilds of DeKalb Avenue instead of Hastings Cutoff. Suddenly, “My Antonia” is everyone’s Antonia!
The prints are Laura Ashley-esque micro-florals, calicos and gingham, the necklines are high, sometimes there is a bib or apron, there is usually at least one ruffle.
Some women have embraced the straightforward prettiness of the trend, adding a wicker basket and clog sandals; others have paired them with Dr. Martens or Air Force Ones and a knowing scowl. It’s a whole new breed of Pioneer Woman. Call her the Urban Prairie Girl (UPG?).
FONDNESS FOR PUFF
On a scorching day in late August, to the bafflement of my husband, I tried on a highnecked, mutton-sleeved, fitted frock actually called the Prairie in the comfort of our apartment’s central air-conditioning.
Across town, in a carriage house in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn, a friend texted me a photo of herself wearing a dress by the same designer. Hers was two pieces: a ruffled pinafore in a pale blue calico over a Peter Pan-collared, bell-sleeve blouse in a contrasting floral, called the Apron.
Both garments sell for around US$400 (about RM1,657) apiece and are designed by a woman who has come to be known by one name, Batsheva (her surname is Hay).
The recent crush of Lower East Side Laura Ingalls Wilders is in large measure attributable to her and a selective but influential group of acolytes, who manage to make the dresses’ Amish dowdiness seem a provocative fashion choice.
It comes, said Hay, who herself pairs the dresses with combat boots, out of “conflicting forces”.
There is, according to the designer, a genuine nostalgia for Laura Ashley, Gunne Sax and Little House On The Prairie that women over 30 can relate to, along with a sort of “re-appropriation and parody” of stereotypically feminine silhouettes and styles.
Hay added: “Some of the women who wear my clothes are just being pretty and simple, going to a Venice Beach brunch where they want to look feminine and relaxed. Others are being feminist and radical and wearing the dresses with hardcore boots and are going more Cindy Sherman, playing with the look.”
Many of Hay’s fans are 20- and 30-somethings in creative industries, who grew up virtually “dying of dysentery” while playing the Oregon Trail computer game.
“I have a fondness for a puffy shoulder,” said Hailey Gates, 28, the host of Viceland’s States Of Undress and a devoted wearer of Batsheva’s line, having learnt about it from Ana Kras, a photographer and furniture designer.
“I had an eBay alert set for ‘vintage moire’ and then I saw she had this moire dress in the colour of really salty butter.”
But Gates associates Batsheva’s dresses less with an actual butter-churning milieu than with memories of a lost New York of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, the last time prairie chic was in fashion here.
“Did you ever go to Lincoln Plaza Cinema?” she asked, referring to the shuttered West Side independent movie theatre.
“That’s how I think of Batsheva’s designs. They are the Lincoln Plaza Cinema of dresses.”
RAISING CHICKENS IN STYLE
Some women’s associations with the style, however, are more obvious.
“I’ve always been inspired by all things Western and frontier,” said Margaret Kleveland, one of two sisters who design Doen, a two-year-old fashion brand based in Los Angeles whose sepia-toned social media feed suggests a Sofia Coppola adaptation of O Pioneers!
The most recent ad campaign featured a flaxen-haired lass, sun filtering through the gathered yoke of her “Prairie Paisley” blouse as she feeds a baby lamb.
Lest you think this is all marketing: Hilary Walsh, the photographer who shot the campaign, raises chickens in her backyard in the Silver Lake neighbourhood of Los Angeles.
Alyssa Miller, a model turned accessories designer (her line, naturally, is called Pilgrim) and one of Doen’s “muses”, keeps a 91-kilogramme pig, Paul, and hens in the middle of Hollywood.
“On one of our shoots we were joking that it was like a remake of the movie Bad Girls,” said Katherine Kleveland, referring to a kitschy 1994 Western starring Drew Barrymore and Andie MacDowell (even at 60, perhaps the archetypical prairie girl and whose actress daughters were early Batsheva adopters) in tight-buttoned bodices and lace-trimmed sweetheart necklines.
“There is a slowness to it, even the visual identity of it feels slow,” said Aurora James, the designer of Brother Vellies.
“You’re not running in it. It’s the complete opposite of those gigantor Louis Vuitton and Balenciaga sneakers. There’s something very gentle and thoughtful about wearing dresses.”