DETACHING WORDS — JAMIE CHRISTIAN DESPLACES PHOTOS — JUDITH LINN
Achingly hip New York-based fashion label A Détacher is often referred to as having been kept ‘deliberately small’, but it’s a description that irks its Polish-born founder, Mona Kowalska. “I did nothing to maintain my business as a small business,” says the designer via a video call from the Big Apple. “I didn’t want to become a manager of people, I wanted to remain a designer and stay as close to that as possible. Doing that automatically meant a much smaller collection. There is all this romanticism around a small business, that it has more integrity, but I always sort of resented how much romance people attributed to it. A small business is difficult.”
Mona has been meticulous in her hands-on approach, from personally sourcing the materials to the sketching to the stitching. Her humility and understated offerings have earned her what The New Yorker describes as an “almost cult-like clientele” of creative women. “You know, I made all the wrong decisions, but I made them right, and I made it work,” she continues with a wry smile. “It was an experiment.” And it’s an experiment that’ll soon come to end with Mona set to step away from the industry and close her Mulberry Street Studio in a matter of months, possibly permanently. “I’ve done this for 21 years, so it was a very difficult decision,” she says. “I love what I do, I love the people that I’ve worked with, the travel that it affords me. It was a difficult decision, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do next. I want to explore my options.” A beacon of morality in a most cynical of industries, Mona Kowalska is famously thoughtful—and political. I wonder if her retreat is in part down to exasperation. She has previously expressed concerns about environmental impacts, and tells me that all fashion is now ‘fast fashion’. The big companies have “consolidated their power”, their “gazillion collections” making it evermore difficult for smaller-scale enterprises. Sustainable design, she says, is good design. She laments fashion’s lack of self-reflection: “The way the industry operates fits perfectly with a Trump presidency. It’s mirroring its times which I think is a real shame.” >>