Introducing Spring 2025 Campaign.
FROM THE ATELIER
WITH EMILY SMITH
Lafayette 148’s Creative Director on her love of life drawing, the unbridled art practice that inspired Spring 2025.
EMILY SMITH: Art, and in particular drawing, has been a constant in my life. Already in first grade at school in Atlanta I was forever sketching with a pencil and paper. So much so that my parents invited a delightful artist called Louise Madea to spend Saturdays with me. She’d teach me how to really look at what I was drawing, and not simply draw from memory; to study the object, ‘see’ its proportion, and capture it on paper—which left a huge impression on me.
Growing up I loved old films. I think I subconsciously understood that costume was key to shaping character and mood in movies. By this time I liked creating my own characters through how I dressed. I’d spend hours sketching out my own ‘looks’ for the forthcoming school week—my mom still has those sketches at home—yet I had no sense that this could develop into a career in fashion. When it came to college, my mom encouraged me to go to art school, and Savannah College of Art and Design offered a degree course where art and fashion went hand in hand. I was soon learning draping and construction, yet it was sketching that I still turned to the most; it was the tool that enabled me to express what I wanted the clothing to do.
In my first year, I started attending life-drawing class. It felt so liberating and visceral—the creative equivalent of working-out in the gym—and I also came to understand that it’s the artistic discipline that requires you to scrutinize proportion, anatomy, and the gestures of the body the most. That, in turn, develops a deep understanding of cut and fit in clothing design.
When I moved to New York in the early 2000s to start my career in fashion, I sought out life-drawing classes in SoHo, as a way of holding onto this personal creative outlet. At Lafayette 148, the Creative Director at the time, Edward Wilkerson, graciously let me sketch during design fittings. Drawing remained the portal through which I’d develop my skills: how to better drape fabrics; how to manipulate or celebrate the human body, whether that’s a bigger shoulder or a wider leg; how to capture what was imagined for a new proportion or silhouette and to make it reality.
For me, the presence of the artist’s hand is the essence of life drawing. You can literally see the smudge of fingerprints in the crumbled particles of charcoal on the paper. That sense of ‘the hand’ is expressed in clothing design through the crafts manship that we’re so committed to at Lafayette 148. For example, when we develop fabric prints, they’re always done by hand, never digitally; the ‘imperfect’ moments are what we embrace the most.
And for this season—with the collection being directly inspired by life drawing—there’s a black knitted dress with a long white fringe which, after several attempts at trying to create the fringe movement, we simply put the dress on a figure and physically followed her lines as she moved, drawing the motions in a more freeform manner, creating a secondary silhouette, akin to the charcoal shadow you add when drawing a human figure from life.