Stella Ishii uses a paper calendar to keep track of the date. Each morning she rips off the day’s page, puts it aside, and goes about her day. Nothing particularly extraordinary, except that she keeps every single page, and has done for years.
This same diaristic approach is one that her and her 6397 co-conspirators, which include head designer Lizzie Owens and, starting this season, career merchant and longtime Barney’s doyenne Judy Collinson, have made their signature. “We’ve been, for a few seasons now, expanding the community of 6397,” said Owens, “this has meant we’ve been asking bigger questions about ourselves, and Judy herself had a lot of questions, which has been clarifying and helped us distill it back to what it’s been.” What Owens meant by that is that this 6397 is the evolved, best, and truest version of the label. Said Ishii: “we all feel really good about this one.”
And there was indeed lots to feel good about. The inarguable winners were a gray jersey skirt—the 6397 equivalent of a comfy pair of gray sweatpants—and a pair of shorts and matching shirt in the lightest and most deliciously diaphanous of silks. A duo of trench coats in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it iridescent suitings, which opened to delightful lining surprises, were new 6397 must-haves, ditto a pair of jeans made in a denim so thin it felt like tropical wool suiting, and a kimono made in austere but embracing fabrics.
This is a label that has found a new energy over the last couple of seasons. Chalk that up to the arrival of Owens as a designer or, as she put it: “how many inter-generational women are round table-ing the design decisions we make as a brand.” These were clothes to live in, to rip the pages off your calendar and spend your every day in.