One day in January last year, the fashion designer Mona Kowalska was working in her studio on Mulberry Street, putting the finishing touches on the latest collection for her clothing line, A Détacher, a deliberately small, rarefied brand with a passionate, almost cult-like clientele of creative New York women. A box of knitwear samples had arrived from a factory in Peru, and Kowalska was trying to figure out whether a pair of wool culottes in UPS brown would work on the runway with shrimp-pink alpaca-lined clogs. She paused to check her phone and found an e-mail from a stranger named Mary Morris. In the e-mail, Morris, who introduced herself as a fifty-five-year-old nurse, told Kowalska that she had been copying her designs from pictures she found on the Internet. "I was inspired by you approximately four years ago while browsing fashion on the web," she wrote. "I was going on a trip to New York and had to put together some outfits. I really admired your fashion and so I set out to copy (on a budget) three or four of your designs to take with me. I had the best time and was so organized, comfortable, and happy with my outfits." Morris's love of design, she wrote, had been spurred as a young child by her next-door neighbor, who had taught Morris how to make clothes for her dolls in exchange for playing within the sight of the neighbor's son, who was stricken by polio. At fourteen, she'd been given a sewing machine by "a nice home-ec teacher," in Florida.
"I'm assuming this woman is a very good nurse, because there's something very caregiving about this letter," Kowalska told me recently, at the Mulberry Street shop. The deep space, housed in a former massage parlor on a block still mostly occupied by red-sauce joints, is brutalist, decorated with romantic touches. The signage is minimal; a single dress hangs in the window. Kowalksa, whose pale beauty and white-blond hair give her an otherworldly quality, was dressed in a man's shirt with the collar folded in, high-waisted denim pants, and a navy cloth belt of her own design tied in a raffish bow at the neck. "I mean, we get things, like, ‘I really love your work. Can I get tickets to your show?' " she said. "But this is someone who sat down and thoughtfully wrote a whole page. This is someone who is busy, has a life. And she isn't really asking anything of me."
The letter appealed to Kowalska, who lived in Warsaw until the age of nine, when she and her mother immigrated to Baltimore. In Communist Poland, Kowalska's mother worked at one of the country's state-owned clothing factories, overseeing the making of muslins and the development of patterns and styles. Kowalska remembers standing on a table as a child, bored and fidgety, while she served as the fit model for the nation's children's clothes. At home, Kowalska's mother made couture clothing for private clients. "People would get their hands on a magazine somehow—it was only the wives of Communist leaders who could afford this—and they would come, and my mother would make something that you saw but couldn't get your hands on."
After earning an undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Chicago, Kowalska moved to Italy, to study fashion. Following a stint as a window dresser at Luisa Via Roma, Florence's famous fashion emporium, she relocated to Paris, learning tailoring from the French designer Myrène de Prémonville and knitwear from Sonia Rykiel, one of the form's premier practitioners. In 1994, Kowalska joined forces with a fellow former window dresser and created A Détacher. The pair did four collections in Europe before Kowalska settled in New York City in 1998, took a business class in Chinatown, cobbled together sixty thousand dollars, and reëstablished A Détacher on her own, in Little Italy. For several years Kowalska was the only employee. (She now has two.)
Kowalska associates her biography with different items of clothing, and those items with specific feelings. A pair of red clogs that her mother found for her on the black market in Poland felt "mythic" because she was "probably the only one in the country to have a pair." In college, she wore a lavender mohair sweater to her job at a preschool because she had wanted to be "soft like a big stuffed animal." For four days a week between 2001 and 2006, she wore the same Margiela dress she had found in a consignment shop, until it was full of holes, because it felt "powerful and right."
Fashion critics trying to define Kowalska's work have tended to land on words such as "interesting." Kowalksa's fans are not so cautious. As one of them, a writer and childbirth educator, told me, of a brown-and-white calf-skimming sleeveless cotton floral dress with a tremendous U-shaped ruffle tacked to the front, "It's a six-hundred-and-seventy-dollar schmatte with a ruffle." But, she added, the crispness of the cotton and the dress's ease of wear made it "a work of art." She told me she was walking down Fulton Street recently when an older man in kurta pajamas stopped her and said, "Excuse me, but that is the most beautiful dress."
The way Kowalska understands it, fashion encapsulates things that interest her: sculpture, history, politics, psychology. Her work has changed over the years—a singular preoccupation with formal experimentation giving way to include an interest in storytelling. She has designed collections for A Détacher on themes including sports injuries, friendship in the novels of Elena Ferrante (the collection included a black-and-white silk dress with a print of a volcano), Patty Hearst (the challenge was not to make the clothes either "too ordinary" or "too ugly"), childhood and boredom (the signature garment was a waxed burlap cape), travel (a map dress), and grandmothers. Kowalska led the way out the side door of her shop, down the fire escape, through the alley, to her basement atelier, where she was working on patterns for her spring/summer 2018 collection. The theme is abstraction, but she had the current political climate on her mind. The designs include a silk print of mascara running and a windbreaker.
Kowalska was still thinking about Morris. One of the things Kowalska loved most about the letter was that Morris had felt like she had gotten the real thing. "She's like, ‘I got it. I got to feel what your clothes feel like,' " Kowalska said. "It's not easy to make things that feel a certain way—I know that." Kowalska had written back, and the two women had struck up an exchange. In her last missive, Morris had shared an annotated list of A Détacher pieces she still intended to copy that included a "sand color velvet mid-calf skirt and oyster green cardigan," a "cotton white knee length slip," and a "sunny yellow cotton skirt and beige longsleeve cardigan." Kowalska fingered a fabric sample that lay on the studio table, which was strewn with patterns, muslins, silks, sewing shears, and a marathon runner's bib number. "I would really like to see those clothes," she said.
