![]() ![]() Excited by the prospect of a new venture, she searched online for dress patterns from the sixties and seventies, many of them for girls, and had them remade for herself: a mint-green sailor’s dress with black rickrack trim a pinafore in gray calico. It was, she said, “really out there.”Īs Hay pushed a stroller along the streets of the Upper West Side in her creations, she found herself receiving frequent compliments. “I said, ‘Let’s puff it up, and let’s add a collar.’ ” The new dress had a more corseted waist, a high neck, additional ruffles, and shoulders into which you could fit a few tennis balls. And, she thought, why not make a few changes to the cut? “It didn’t really have much of a sleeve-the arm was pretty straight,” Hay recalled. “How she was modelling this virginal kind of look, but being so much the opposite.”Ī dressmaker in Manhattan’s garment district told Hay that it would cost two hundred and fifty dollars just to make a pattern, so she decided to have several copies of the dress made, in different fabrics that she bought on eBay, some of which were intended for upholstery. “They reminded me of Courtney Love’s ‘Kinderwhore’ aesthetic,” she said. She told me that sometimes, feeling restless, she looked at two images from Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills,” taken in the nineteen-seventies, in which Sherman poses, in a paisley skirt and knee-high boots, as an angry housewife. Alexei photographed Hay constantly, and sometimes she modelled Orthodox styles for him.īy the time Hay decided to get the Laura Ashley dress remade, she and Alexei had married and were living on the Upper West Side, where she cared for their children, Ruth and Solomon, and ran what she describes as an Orthodox household. ![]() Alexei was serious about his spiritual pursuits, but he and Hay both took an interest, too, in Orthodox clothing, with its modesty and rigor. Then she began dating Alexei Hay, a well-known fashion photographer, who had recently become an Orthodox Jew. In her early twenties, when she was a lawyer, she would throw on a Moschino dress and platform shoes at the end of the day and head downtown. As a teen-ager, she scoured secondhand shops for seventies-era polyester dresses and Miu Miu heels. “I wanted the name of someone who’s known for being beautiful,” Rosenberg told me. She liked Yocheved and Elisheva, but settled on Batsheva, after the object of King David’s lust. When choosing a name for her daughter, Rosenberg was drawn to the Old Testament. Her mother, Gail Rosenberg, met her father, an Israeli research engineer, while she was working on a kibbutz. Hay, a willowy redhead with a quietly assertive manner, grew up in a secular Jewish family in Kew Gardens, Queens. But the fabric at the armpits had frayed, and then torn beyond repair. Calf-length with long sleeves and a slightly tapered waist, it was made of a dense corduroy printed with green leaves and purple roses. Designed by Laura Ashley, the dress, like most of the British icon’s clothing, blended a folksy craft aesthetic with the dreamy romanticism of the Pre-Raphaelites. In February of 2016, Batsheva Hay, a former lawyer with two young children, decided to have a favorite vintage dress remade. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |