Meet A Détacher Designer Mona Kowalska
Mona Kowalska. Photo: Brigitte Lacombe, Courtesy of A Détacher
Mona Kowalska, the designer behind New York-based label A Détacher is not your typical fashion designer. The Polish-born, Baltimore-raised Kowalska’s unorthodox road to fashion is evident in her signature silhouettes, breezy dresses and luxurious separates, the kind of fashion that heeds the description of “thinking woman’s fashion,” but really means, “women dressing for themselves.”
Kowalska studied Political Science in Chicago “partly to please my parents,” she said in a talk last night at the Museum of Arts & Design, third in a series aptly titled “Designing Women.” But before she could finish her degree, she up and moved to Italy to study fashion design, which seems like a strange shift in gears, but when taking into consideration the kinds of clothes she makes, her Political Science background makes perfect sense. It also makes more sense after learning that back in Poland, her mom used to be the head of the atelier at one of the factories, “there would alway be wives of communists having fittings at the house,” she said. “Wives of communists,” seems to perfectly echo the kinds of clothes that she makes, if we imagine these women as being incredibly well educated, and sophisticated, which they most likely were.
“I don’t know that when I went to study I had the sense of (an aesthetic),” she told Yahoo Style after her talk, “it was much more about like ‘I’m going to Italy! I’m going to have this other life and I’m going to study this.” After finishing her studies in Italy she lived in Paris for a year as head of the atelier at Sonia Rykiel but found that corporate life was not for her. “It was hard for me to see why (so many) meetings were necessary,” she said laughing. After a year, she packed up, moved to New York, and got ready to open her own label and store, which she accomplished a year after that.
“Once I started with my company, after working with other people, there was a period of ridding (myself) of other people’s ideas, and figuring out what really interests me.” In the beginning, this meant crafting intricate patterns and focusing on the structure of the pieces she was creating, but as she got more comfortable, and began participating during fashion week, her expression broadened. “When we started doing the shows, (the collections) became about more complex things,” Kowalska explained, “I collaborated with people, and if I talk about music (for the show) it helps of there is a big overarching idea (for the collection), so it made me flesh out everything.”
Looks from A Détacher’s Fall 2013 and Fall 2014 collections. Photos: Elizabeth Lippman, Courtesy of A Détacher.
Her work is more conceptual than most of her peers, although in this case “conceptual” doesn’t refer to “unwearable.” Usually the conversation about whether or not “fashion is art,” revolves around couture, the heavily embroidered/bejeweled/constructed, the pieces that belong in museums, and not on our bodies while we take the train, but Kowalska’s approach can only be described as that of an artist, although she does not see it that way. “I don’t necessarily think of fashion as art,” she revealed, “but I think it’s a really big, rich topic, because it involves history, craft, sociology, psychology, economics. It’s big anyway, we don’t need to add anything else.”
The same can be said for her clothes,which are inspired by things like the novels of Elena Ferrante (Fall 2015), or childhood boredom (Spring 2014), or even on the juxtaposition of nature and futuristic elements in Japan (Fall 2012). Regardless of how high-brow or lofty her starting point may be, the end result is always utterly wearable clothes that are classic because they are seemingly always evocative of “now.” “Fabrics should correspond to the way people live,” she said during the talk, “a silk gazar might be beautiful, but a woman will not be riding the subway in a silk gazar dress, so that will not work.”
Kowalska is interested in real women, not in the way the term “real women” has been co-opted by the media, but by actual women out in the world, going about their lives. You, me, our mothers, and our grandmothers. She is hyper-focused on her work and what it means, keeping a very small team – three, including herself – and taking the time to drape everything herself. “For me, it’s like writing,” she explained of her design process, “you have this thing that you want to say and it builds through each piece.” Her work is highly personal and she is meticulous about getting it just right, “it’s not lost on me that we’re only going to sell five capes, and I shouldn’t be spending all this time on this,” she joked about a recent collection, but for the five women who buy that cape, it will inevitably become a prized possession.
The A Détacher store, which stood on Mott Street for 16 years but has recently moved to a new location, also functions as her studio. She knows her customers intimately, and seems surprised at how many of them know each other, although for a small store that doesn’t advertise, and only has a few wholesale accounts, it is inevitable that it has survived throughout the years on account of women telling other women about their “favorite secret store.” Although she has been in business for 16 years, Kowalska still doesn’t feel like she’s “made it.”
“I feel like an underachiever,” she said last night after an audience member asked her when she realized she was successful, “but I like what I make, and that outweighs other things.” And for the women who flock to her store, and who came to hear her speak about her process last night, her clothes outweigh the other things as well.
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