With her eyes almost continually covered by amorphous vintage sunglasses, it’s hard to imagine anyone more qualified than stylist Catherine Baba to create a collection of shades inspired by, well, her own. “I just can’t take them off my face, darling!” enthuses the Australian-born Parisian transplant, who studied her own flea market eyewear finds, amassed over decades (“I got my first pair in Sydney as a child age ten . . . perhaps younger”), for the project and is now, as you’d hope, a die-hard fan. After all, if 28.6K Instagram followers covet her fashion-forward look on the street style circuit—that usually means vintage Yves Saint Laurent paired with turbans, or some elaborate piece of couture draped in a “more aerodynamic way,” so she can make her way around the city on a bike—it’s likely there’s a significant number of advocates who’d throw a euro or dollar her way in order to grab a piece of the action themselves.
“I must have been a geisha in a former life,” Baba goes on to admit when explaining the role her other longtime signature, a two-decades-strong collection of secondhand kimonos salvaged from the 1910s to the fifties, played in the collection. A turn-of-the-century shibori print was lifted from one and paired with her Candy Darling–inspired frames, while a delicate butterfly pattern was taken from another in an ode to Billie Holiday. The Eartha Kitt style, meanwhile, is elegantly covered in a graphic tortoiseshell print, and it will be unveiled alongside the others at the Dover Street Market launch tomorrow by the designer herself. “All of these female icons were inspirations to me as a kid,” she explains.
That each well-conceived pair is handmade by F – O Vision (just outside of Milan) was no accident either: “I love that they are not mass produced,” says Baba. “Of course, I want these sunglasses to be on everyone’s faces, but as someone who works in the industry, I feel it’s not only important to create, but to be considerate and responsible when creating.” That progressive type of thinking extends to a pay-it-forward element within the collection, too. Orange Babies, an Amsterdam-based charity that focuses on helping HIV-infected women and their children in Africa, will receive a 10 percent cut of the proceeds. “Share the wealth!” Baba declares. “And play. I just love drag.” Two foolproof mantras to live by.
F – O and Catherine Baba starts at $271; newyork.doverstreetmarket.com.
Dover Street Market Open House, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. on September 10, at 160 Lexington Avenue, New York.
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