Stacey Bendet is over minimalism. “I really wanted to go back to this world of whimsy, but with elegance,” she said of her spring 2025 collection for Alice + Olivia. Dubbed “The Hotel of Imagination,” Bendet dreamt up a fanciful hotel, with each room taking on a different component of a collection filled with everything from the trendy (like the candy-colored striped rugby and butter yellow drop-waist maxi) to the over-the-top (the tiered corset dress with moiré polka-dots and floor-sweeping velvet burnout cape).
Bendet exercises thoughtfulness when it comes to engineering her designs. This should come as no surprise, seeing as she built the brand on her search for the perfect pair of pants. This season she was expanding on her original mission with the wide-legged New Olivia pant. “It makes your butt look amazing,” she said. “Literally the best butt fit.” Furthermore, she developed the outsized floral textile to nip in at the waist, and orchestrated hidden boning in a corset to push up the breasts. She even went so far as to make the bottom tier of some of the layered dresses removable so that they may be worn from day to night. (“When you snap it off, you can wear it as a little capelet,” she said.)
While the amount of the embellishment that goes into some of the pieces is admirable—such as her 3-D hand-beaded florals—it feels incongruent with downmarket finishes, such as the exposed zippers and elasticated back panels. Given the price point, consumers deserve a product that looks considered from every angle.
Bendet describes her clientele as “ladies who lunch,” “Alice + Olivia boss babes,” and women in Palm Beach. “Within each print story, I always work on the prints in a way that there’s something for everyone,” she said. But while Bendet attempts to place a different kind of woman in each of her hotel’s rooms, perhaps she’d be better off serving one client.