“Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.”
There, all is order and beauty, luxury, calm and delight.
Charles Baudelaire · L’Invitation au voyage · 1857
Ma chère,
Some clothes are bought. Others are remembered - the dress you wore the night the rain caught you both without an umbrella; the shirt he never asked for back.
We make the second kind. Linen from Flanders that softens like a secret kept for years. Silk from Como that moves a heartbeat after you do. And small things, placed with intention: a ribbon at the nape, a shell button, a hem that moves when you walk.
Wear them as if someone is about to notice. Someone usually is.
- Isabella
for nights full of stars
a little after eleven
a heartbeat after you doLe programme
Four acts, from Flanders to the islands
Act I
Flanders · Belgian linen
Linen, after the rain
In Flanders they once called the river Lys the Golden River, for the fortune its flax carried downstream. The fibre still grows slowly there, under cool rain and long northern light - which is why it lasts, and why it learns you.
The first summer it is crisp. By the third, it falls as if it had always known the shape of your shoulders.
It creases. Let it. Creases are where the day has been.
barefoot, obviously
Entr’acte
Paris
In spirit
“Vienne la nuit sonne l’heure
Les jours s’en vont je demeure.”
Guillaume Apollinaire · Le Pont Mirabeau · 1912
Let night come, let the hour strike - the days go by, I remain.
Paris taught the world that a day can be composed like a poem: coffee standing at the counter, a bookshop at noon, a bridge at dusk, and no hurry to be anywhere else. We design for days like that - wherever you happen to find them.
The Back Story
Open backs · low ties · bare shoulders
The things only you will know are there.
Act II
Como · Italian silk
red tie-dye, ComoThe art of the long lunch
On the lake, lunch is not a meal; it is an afternoon. Silk is still woven there the old way, by people who can judge a thread with their eyes closed. Ours is cut to fall rather than hang - cool when you put it on, warm a moment later, as if it already knew you.
Wear the top with bare arms and a long lunch. Wear the skirt and walk slowly. It rewards it.
Intermezzo
The House · the founder
Before there were clothes, there was a voice.
Isabella Voldman spent her first life on the opera stage in New York, where every singer learns that the most moving moment of an aria is the breath before it. Travelling through Europe, she found that same breath in its makers - in weavers who will not rush, in seams finished by hand where no one will see them but the woman who wears them.
ISABELLA V. is her love letter to that patience.
Read her storyLes Mains
The hands that make the cloth
Three of the oldest cloths in the world, from the places that have made them longest. We name them because they deserve to be known.
Flanders · flax
Flax grows tall in the cool rain and long light of northern Europe. Spun into linen, it softens with every wash and lasts for decades.
Como · silk
Silk has been woven on the shores of Lake Como since the Renaissance. The craft is handed down - and so is the standard.
The Andes · alpaca
Alpaca has warmed the people of the Andes for thousands of years. Ours is knitted by hand in Peru, one patient stitch at a time.
alpacas, PeruAct III
Peru · Alpaca, knitted by hand
Nocturne
High in the Andes, where the nights are cold enough to see your breath, the alpaca grows a fleece lighter than wool, and warmer. In Peru it is knitted by hand, stitch after patient stitch, so that no two cardigans are ever quite alike.
Two cardigans, both hand-knitted in Peru: the Olivia, in baby alpaca with mother-of-pearl buttons, and the Inessa, knitted from a single fine thread.
Pull one over a slip dress on a ferry deck, or over your shoulders on the terrace when the evening turns - and over his, eventually, when he forgets his own.
It holds the warmth of the day a little longer than the day does.
The shirt she’ll steal
Buy it for him. She’ll be wearing it by Sunday.
…and on herThe same shirt, borrowed
Finale
Home · the islands · La Maison
Every journey ends barefoot
Ours ends in the islands, where the house began - and where the Emmalani wrap skirt was first imagined for a café owner on Kauaʻi.
And linen for the hours that belong to no one: sheets that soften a little more every night, and a throw for the evening you decide not to go out after all.
Encore
Cartes postales · letters from the road
A few letters a season - new acts, private previews, stories from the makers, and nothing you’d mind finding in your inbox at midnight.