There’s a protocol for how to get dressed, what to wear, why it has to be certain cuts, colors. It’s a very meaningful gesture every day. “Even getting dressed has a real spiritual connotation. “It’s something that has anticipated every aspect of life,” he tells me. By that point he had changed his lifestyle drastically, developing a close relationship with a Hasidic rabbi and becoming an Orthodox Jew, observant of its rules and eager for his future wife to partake, too. They ran in the same social circles for years before they started dating. “I always dressed differently, in a way that I loved but no one else around me liked,” she says.Īlexei, the son of the real estate developer Henry Hay, was an established photographer when he and Batsheva met. While her female colleagues attended cocktail parties in DVF wrap dresses, Batsheva wore weirdo vintage finds and Comme des Garçons. After graduating from Stanford University and Georgetown Law School, she spent her twenties and early thirties working intense hours at firms like Simpson Thacher & Bartlett while wearing “awful Theory suits.” She loathed her career.
It was a way of sharing what she was feeling with them.”īatsheva grew up in a secular Jewish family in Kew Gardens, Queens, loving dolls, drama, Shakespeare, and costumes.
She made those dresses in the beginning just for her friends. “She really enjoys being friends with women and having a good time. “I don’t think that she knew that she wanted to be a clothing designer,” says Alexei, who shot the portraits here for T&C. It was a vintage Laura Ashley dress that served as the template for the first dress Batsheva ever made. The most revelatory moment in Batsheva’s busy year came when she released her first collection for Laura Ashley, where the practice originated of covering everything in sight-your bed, your couch, your windows, yourself, your children-in coordinated floral chintz, an ideal embraced by the likes of Princess Diana. Meanwhile, a motley crew of boldface names walked Batsheva’s show during New York Fashion Week at hot chocolate emporium Serendipity 3, including actress Busy Philipps, model Veronica Webb, and one of the lesser-known Culkins, Rory, whom the designer met through Alexei. Shortly thereafter Emhoff and Batsheva collaborated on a candy-colored knitwear collection, and major labels started casting Emhoff to walk their runways. When Ella Emhoff chose a Batsheva frock for the inauguration of her stepmother Kamala Harris as vice president, fashion’s star-minting vultures heard the buzz in the air. The religiosity has become the halo to her brand, which expanded from the narrow premise of floral and moiré prairie dresses with a Victoriana-meets-Laura-Ingalls vibe to shoes, fragrance, jewelry, and furniture during a pandemic-challenged period for many of her industry peers. “This was part of my being lost,” she tells T&C, referring to a period of immense change after she left a life as corporate lawyer by day and girl on the downtown New York scene by night to become a wife and mother running an Orthodox home where modest dress standards are honored. Mommy-and-me, the ritual of parent and child wearing identical outfits, which today reads as equal parts dated, perverse, and radical, was where the designer’s career in fashion began, in 2016. “She really loved it,” the designer says, speaking for her daughter. Today she wears a bathing suit and shorts while Batsheva is in one of her voluminous printed cotton housedresses and Nike Air Jordans, but the previous Friday for Shabbat dinner they sported matching Batsheva dresses. “Can the whole world hear you?” Ruth asks, wondering why an iPhone is recording everything she and her mother say. The dialogue ping-pongs from one inquisitive kid to the other to questions about how the Hays have built a small but influential fashion business out of practicing observant Judaism, which the couple-both of whom were raised secular-came to as adults. When the couple arrive at their Upper West Side apartment after their respective workdays, their nanny is finishing dinner and their children, Ruth, 8, and Solomon, 6, are eagerly awaiting their attention. Chez Hay, family matters more than fashion, even if they’re inextricably intertwined.
It is not, however, the best time to have a linear conversation about the state of their artistic partnership and the traditions they follow. Thursday evening is a great time to witness the controlled chaos and the familial priorities that define the household of photographer Alexei Hay and his wife, the designer Batsheva Hay.