In February 2016, Batsheva Hay, a former lawyer with two children, decided to remake one of the most popular vintage dresses. Designed by Laura Ashley, this dress, like most British idol costumes, combines folk craftsmanship with the pre-Raphaelite dreamy romanticism. Small long sleeves, long sleeves, a slightly tapered waist, made from dense corduroy printed with green leaves and purple roses. But the underarm fabric is worn out and then torn to repair.
Hay is a chic redhead who grew up in a secular Jewish family in Kew Gardens, Queens. Her mother, Gail Rosenberg, met her father, an Israeli research engineer, who was working for a kibbutz. When choosing a name for her daughter, Rosenberg was attracted to the Old Testament. She likes Yocheved and Elisheva, but settles on Batsheva after David’s desire. “I want the name of a person who is famous for beauty,” Rosenberg told me. “Beautiful, but the power is also.”
Hay has always liked retro clothes. As a teenager, she searchesed the 70’s polyester dress and Miu Miu heels in a second-hand shop. In her early twenties, when she was a lawyer, she would wear a Moschino dress and flats at the end of the day and head to the city centre. Then she began dating the famous fashion photographer Alexei Hay, who recently became an orthodox Jew. Alexei is very serious about his spiritual pursuit, but he and Hay are also interested in Orthodox clothing, his attitude and rigor. Alexei often shoots hay, and sometimes she shapes the Orthodox style for him.
When Hay decided to recreate the Laura Ashley dress, she married Alexei and lived in the Upper West Side, where she took care of their children Ruth and Solomon and acted in the way she described the orthodox family. She told me that sometimes, she was restless, she looked at two photos in Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Movie Stills”, shot in the 1970s, Sherman wearing a paisley skirt and knee-high Boots, as an angry housewife. “They remind me of the ‘Kinderwhore’ aesthetic of Courtney Love,” she said. “How she shaped the appearance of this virgin, but the opposite is true.”
A tailor in Manhattan’s clothing district told Hay that it cost $250 to make a pattern, so she decided to make several dresses on different fabrics on eBay, some of which were used to make interiors. And, she thought, why not make some changes to the cut? “It doesn’t really have a lot of sleeves – the arms are straight,” Hay recalls. “I said, ‘Let’s blow it up, let’s add a collar.'” This new dress has a tighter waist, a high collar, extra hem and shoulders, and you can wear a few tennis balls. She said, “Really there.”
When Hay pushed the stroller along the streets of the Upper West Side in her work, she found herself often praised. Excited about the prospects of the new business, she searched online for the costumes of the 1960s and 1970s, many of them girls, and let them remake themselves: mint green sailor costumes, black rickrack trims; gray printed aprons. She also designed a version for her daughter. She built a website to sell moms and my clothes, but no one bought the size of the child; people want adult dresses.