On the Silhouette.
The line we keep returning to — across centuries, and across this morning's feed.
The line.
The waist-to-hip line — a ratio close to 0.7 — has been the figure painters drew toward for four hundred years. Rubens drew it. Sargent drew it. Photographers framed it. Couturiers from the 1860s onward built dresses to honor it.
Almost no woman has ever achieved it on her body alone. The women in those paintings, those photographs, those red carpets — they were in collaboration with the architecture sewn into the lining of their dresses.
We are obsessed with that line, and with the harmony required to honor it.
The line painters chased for four hundred years.
Camille Clifford, the original Gibson Girl, c. 1906. The Edwardian S-bend — corseted to its extreme.
Sophia Loren, fitting with Emilio Schuberth, 1950s.
Eva Herzigová in Thierry Mugler, Vogue Germany, 1995.
Irina Shayk, Andreas Kronthaler for Vivienne Westwood, Spring/Summer 2024.
The women we keep returning to.
Gina Lollobrigida. Sophia Loren in the Ponti years. Marilyn Monroe in the white halter. Lee Radziwill at a dinner in 1962. These are the women we built the early references around — held in their dresses, photographed in their best moments, the line drawn cleanly from rib to hip.
They were not alone. Look at this week's red carpets, this morning's covers. Sabrina Carpenter is wearing a corset onstage every night. The Kardashians have made the silhouette a public obsession. Stylists for every actress at every premiere are reaching for the same architecture — sometimes hidden, sometimes deliberately shown.
The line did not go away. It went underground for a generation, and now it is back. We are building dresses for the women who want to inhabit it without thinking about it all night.
The dress should be doing the work. She should be doing everything else.
The pursuit.
IN SOLISIA is a long study of the line from the waist to the hip. Each drop is one chapter in that investigation.
The First Edition is a bias-cut silk gown built on an internal corselet — a structured, ruched bodice above a skirt of heavyweight charmeuse that falls and flutes as the body moves. Romantic, a little nostalgic, engineered underneath. The next edition will approach the line differently — different structure, different fabric, the same obsession at the center. We do this one thing. We intend to do it better than anyone.
It is a long project. We are at the beginning of it.
The Esmeralda Gown — Ivory