Lou Dallas Spring 2018 Ready-To-Wear....Fashionweekly...On Fow24news.com

You could have easily mistaken the Lou Dallas show for an art opening, given the crowd of cool kids that wrapped around the block of Bridget Donahue’s gallery on the Bowery. The label’s designer, Raffaella Hanley, comes from that world...
instead of attending fashion school like the majority of her New York peers, she chose to study at RISD, one of the most prestigious art institutions in the country.

Hanley has the unbridled imagination that comes with being an outsider, and her references are all born from a fairy-tale never-never land of enchanted forests and wood nymphs. Where the hoodie has lately been a touchstone for many young designers in New York, Lou Dallas has more whimsical sensibilities. Many of her diaphanous lemon yellow and navy blue lace-up blouses and bias-cut slip dresses came covered in a fantastical print created in collaboration with her artist friend Will Sheldon.

That said, Hanley’s approach to fashion isn’t all sweetness and light. Behind her distressed cotton tank dresses and pretty, high-waisted, belted short shorts, there lies a real commitment to sustainability. Ninety percent of the collection was made from deadstock fabric, much of which had been hand-dyed with painstaking care in natural pigments such as turmeric. Even the more decadent Renaissance-style cropped jackets were made from a vintage toile de Jouy originally destined for a world of interiors. Then there was the spellbinding hand-embroidery to consider—snaking up the sleeve of billowy button-downs and frock coats, embellishments that seemed to have been wrought by Lilliputian hands. How Hanley will be able to scale that magical homespun aesthetic remains to be seen. Either way, there’s a rare, special quality about her work that feels like a breath of fresh air in New York, and is certainly one of a kind.