“We call it the starquarters, because we’re not heads, we’re stars, we’re beams of light.” JJ Martin was speaking from the “galactic deck” of her new Milan offices, a sunroom with 360 degree views of Milan, a gong encrusted with meteorite particles, and a crystal altar, where her company La DoubleJ hosts yoga and meditation classes, and sound and energy healing sessions for its employees and neighbors.
Martin isn’t quite like any other Milan-based designer-founder. She takes the “vibration raising” part of the gig as seriously as she does the fabric sourcing and the print development. It was just about 10 years ago when she launched the brand, choosing prints from the Mantero silk archive, which supplies Italy’s top-tier labels. The spring 2026 La DoubleJ collection, she pointed out, features prints exclusively developed in-house.
That in-house team has grown to an impressive 100 employees, and the plans for growth include a New York townhouse scheduled to open in early 2026, with a sort of “galactic deck” and energy healings of its own—the Upper East Side doesn’t know what’s coming for it.
The new clothes that will stock the space were inspired by a spiritual trip Martin cohosted in Turkey, in particular a whirling dervish ceremony she witnessed, which involves meditative spinning. “I came back with all the photos, and that’s where the idea for the circle skirt was born.” There are 22 of them in the lineup, in different patterns and fabrics, yielding surprisingly varied but uniformly lively results.
Martin herself was wearing trousers at the presentation, a rarity, and pointed out the pieces for the minimalist contingent: an almost preppy tailored red blazer with gold buttons, flat front pants in a perky pink, and an offering of white shirts almost as extensive as those 22 circle skirts. But “more, not less” is an best way to describe the brand ethos: more color, more print, more woo-woo, more joy. Before I left I put my left hand, “the receiving hand,” on a labradorite that called to me from the crystal altar; apparently it’s useful for “upper chakra activation.” If you don’t leave a La DoubleJ presentation happier, you weren’t paying attention.
#DoubleJ #Spring #ReadytoWear #Collection
