Nestled in the back of a café in New York’s NoLIta neighborhood, maroon cardie wrapped tightly around her narrow frame, Emma Fletcher closes her eyes while recalling a painful moment from last year. “I felt like I astral-planed, like I wasn’t even present,” she murmurs. “I hadn’t slept in days.” Suddenly she straightens up, brightening. “But now I feel like if I did another one, it might be fun. Not so dark.”
A look from Lyell’s spring 2009 collection.
A designer who professes to be far happier tucked into her jewel-box boutique on Elizabeth Street than taking bows at her first runway show—the source of the aforementioned distressing memory—Fletcher, an Aussie who moved to New York in 1994, is something of a designer anomaly: She doesn’t sew or sketch, and she’d sooner trawl stores for wallpaper fabric than seek inspiration from some far-flung locale or glossy pictorial. Just try extracting the story of how, precisely, she ended up conjuring Lyell, the delicate Thirties-vibe clothing line that has attracted such starry fans as Michelle Williams, Natalie Portman and Naomi Watts. “I was working at Tramps”—the now closed rock venue that Fletcher managed—“and I started making things.” A few coats and swimsuits, specifically. “I looked in the Yellow Pages to find a patternmaker, and he made my first samples.”
Had she been struck by a bolt of creative lightning? Not quite. “I think I was pretty frustrated with my job,” says Fletcher, 38, who by 2003 had scraped together enough savings to rent a tiny storefront a couple blocks from her friend Jane Mayle’s shop (the pair met via mutual pals in the neighborhood). Tiled in black and white, furnished with a simple wooden desk and stocked with Fletcher’s vintage-inflected pieces, the boutique drew the kind of downtown girl whose taste veers more toward ladylike lace than tank tops and leggings. “I’m insecure, because I read about these designers who say they have a design process,” Fletcher says. “I don’t plan anything! I just have a departure point, and I go.”
Often that departure is a vintage frock, which she literally slices and dices into a blouse, a pair of tap pants, even a cocktail dress; she also uses old clothes as inspiration for new designs. One of her first pieces was an ebony wool and silk dress with small deer silhouettes cut below the collarbone; last season an azure blouse featured dozens of pin tucks along the shoulders and neck. As retailer Steven Alan, an early supporter of her efforts, explains, “Emma is able to reinterpret vintage in a way that is current. I appreciate that she gets the details right.”
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