Nellie Partow tried to find a pithy encapsulation of the inspiration for her latest resort collection. “I find that sometimes it’s hard to articulate [something] specific, but I really resonate with women and their real-life moments and experiences,” she said. “In my design process I try to be true to myself because that’s the only thing I feel that I can genuinely do.”
An instinctual designer, Partow is driven mostly by the materials she finds when she travels to her mills in Italy, always willing to go deep into their archives and search out something unexpected that captures her mood for the moment. This season it was a 100% natural organic-cotton fabric “from the ’60s or ’70s” with yarns that ran on the warp (i.e., the yarns that run vertically) woven in a wave-like pattern that from afar appeared to be a cozy nubby knit. She used it to make a slim skirt, which was elegant in its silhouette but had a workhorse quality due to its almost rough, natural hand. She paired it with her classic oversized silk-and-wool-blend button-down, whose sheen was a perfect foil.
Partow is invariably drawn to specialty metallic fabrics whose touch rarely matches what is seen by the eye. For resort, a tissue-thin (as in really tissue-thin) metallic lamé was used on a sort of oversized T-shirt and midi-length drawstring skirt. It is hard to describe the color because it went from gold to silver to mustard yellow to gray, depending on how the light hit it. “It’s hand-painted gold on the underside,” she explained, holding the piece inside out, “so the light reflects the gold through the silver and you get this unique color play.”
She also experimented with hand-dyeing techniques, like on a fabric with wide-set, thin-as-a-pencil-line black stripes whose dark, sandy hue came courtesy of what she called a “cold press” technique that left behind an uneven wash of color, like a beautiful water stain. With it, she made a simple button-down shirt and a pair of narrow trousers, to which her longtime stylist Camilla Nickerson added a calfskin leather skirt and a pair of black flip-flops. Partow’s clothes are uncomplicated because women’s lives never are.
