The Best of High Summer
Female-founded emerging brands for your most elevated summer.
It’s been a moment. While L’étude was quietly stepping into a new season of its own, summer arrived, and with it, a wardrobe question worth taking seriously. These are a few of the brands I found myself returning to. Color, texture, and design that feels genuinely original. And, as typical, female-founded.
Ucha
My reintroduction to Ibero American design came through Sofia Ortiz, and I haven’t stopped finding remarkable female designers from the region since. There’s a quality that connects them: work that is playful and precise at once, deeply experimental with fabric and color, and clearly made by someone who loves what she’s doing.
Ucha, founded by Lucia Guillermina Cerato, launched as a contemporary jewelry project in Buenos Aires in 2013 and now operates from a studio in Madrid. A single piece might reference glass beads, vintage resin flowers, and materials sourced from the 1980s. The invention and craftsmanship are genuinely staggering. These are the pieces that stop people on the street. They won’t be able to help themselves.
Soleil Soleil
Emma and Isabel's Sydney-based studio begins many pieces with hand-painted or hand-drawn designs that are then translated onto textiles. Every piece feels like summertime. Picture the woman who washes her hair in the sea, whose style looks effortless because it simply is. The ease of someone who knows herself and is enjoying the life she has. Whose routine consists of walks to the local farmers market, whose diet is mainly whatever was caught that morning. She wears Soleil Soleil. I already can't wait to put on my newest purchases and feel exactly like her.
Cala de la Cruz
Textile design’s favorite season is summer. It’s an undisputed fact, and we couldn’t possibly put together this list without Carolina Lopez’s Cala de la Cruz. The name itself is taken from the Spanish word for a rounded bay where the sea rests calmly. What better place to be kissed by the sun.
The brand was founded in Cali, Colombia, where every style is made by local small businesses. Elevated resort wear with a real story behind it, touched by hands that hold a genuine love of craft and an appreciation for a well-lived life. That’s the whole point, isn’t it.
At First Sight
If you’ve ever spent time on the Mediterranean, you know it in your body before you know it in your mind. The reason so many designers leave that place with something new in them, something they have to put somewhere.
Judit Oms put it into her brand. Based in Barcelona and founded in 2021, At First Sight is a celebration of femininity: warm, romantic, sensual. Her pieces carry a quiet confidence rather than announcing it. Anyone I see wearing them feels like someone I want to know. Girls who get it. What is it, exactly? That same feeling the Mediterranean puts in your bones. The one that’s impossible to name and impossible to forget.
Summer, at its best, has a way of making everything feel possible. These brands carry that quality in them. A reminder that you don’t need to be in Sydney or Barcelona or floating in the Mediterranean to feel it. You just need the right thing on your back.
À bientôt,
Kelly