Fashion Collaboration with Isy B. Design from the Cayman Islands

 

One cold, gray November day in 2016-Northern Germany’s dreary, rainy kind of November, with the first snowfall of the season-I stumbled upon an email in my spam folder (which I almost deleted). The subject line read: "Interested in a tropical print collaboration?" To my surprise, it wasn’t spam. It was from Isy Obi of Isy B. Design, a fashion designer from the Cayman Islands. Talk about tropical vibes!

 

Isy B. specializes in luxury Caribbean fashion and resort wear and had just won the title of Lifestyle Designer of the Year at Phoenix Fashion Week 2016. Needless to say, I was more than intrigued!

 

Thanks to the magic of modern technology-emails, Skype, WeTransfer, and even some good old-fashioned postal service (to send a spool of thread in the perfect shade from the Cayman Islands to Germany)-we collaborated on every detail of the project. From the initial concept and style discussions to revisions, test prints, and production, it was an exciting (and steep) learning curve.

 

Isy B. tasked me with designing a "Mermaid Collection" for summer 2018. The collection featured four placement prints for kaftans and T-shirt dresses, as well as one abstract all-over print for dresses and other garments. The themes we chose? Seahorses, coral, seaweed, and, of course, mermaid tails.
 

These are the kaftans:

 

 

The allover print is an abstracted mermaid tail with more underwater elements in a tropical colour palette:
 

 

You can see more of Isy B. Design’s fashion on their website  and here is the link to her 2018 Lookbook. And I am more then happy to announce that we have officially started working on Isy B. Design’s new fashion collection for 2019.