Whether or not they plan a formal runway show, these under-the-radar talents bear watching. Some create their own fabrics, others work magic with knitting yarns, and still others combine street style and high style in strikingly inventive ways. Here, our picks for the season.
“We’re a little drawn to spirits,” Julie Haus was saying the other day. And to their eerie haunts as well. During a recent visit to the Catskills, with her husband and design partner, Jason Alkire, she discovered the moldering remains of a once majestic hotel on Overlook Mountain, near Woodstock, N.Y. “I thought, ‘Wow, if you squinted, you could probably see the ghosts in the wall.’ ”
There were no ghosts. But she and Mr. Alkire, an artist and photographer, captured the gray ruin on film, interpreting its moss-covered walls and surroundings in a series of prints rendered layer-over-layer on cotton velvet, four-ply silk and organza. For fall, the ethereal patterns will also include eerie tree limbs, fox fur and the like.
The designers, the winners this month of the Fashion Group International rising star award, are natural-born storytellers. “It’s almost like we’re writing a script,” said Mr. Alkire, who usually dreams up the patterns that find their way into Ms. Haus’s deceptively simple designs: high-waist trousers, loosefitting boat-neck tanks and A-line skirts, some influenced, she said, by her design idols, Dries Van Noten and Marni among them, and detailed with athletic netting, decorative threads and other bits of whimsy.
Their supporters have included Barneys New York, Neiman Marcus and Tootsies in Houston, which recently began carrying the line, which is priced from $600 for blouses to as much as $3,500 for dresses.
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Ms. Haller’s all-knit wardrobe includes, she said, “pieces you would never normally think of putting in a knitting machine.” There are trumpet-hemmed pencil skirts and A-line variations, ultrawide mohair trousers and slightly boxy minimalist tops made from knitted velvet. Prices range from $595 to $895 for sweaters; from $1,295 to $1,695 for a velvet dress.
There’s a lyrical feeling to the collection. Some pieces incorporate fragments of text, the language inspired by a cross-stitch design she discovered in a tapestry book.
“That fabric looked so vintage,” she said. “I thought of a Victorian woman in mourning.”
Opening Ceremony has carried the line exclusively since its introduction. “Now,” Ms. Haller said, “the field is wide open.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 12, 2015, on page E9 of the New York edition. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
