Anna October

If you love a dress that follows the body, yes. Anna October's signature pieces are dresses, particularly slip dresses, constructed with bias cut techniques that follow the body's contours. The designer describes her garments as a veil enveloping a woman's body and following her movements, so these are pieces bought for drape and feel rather than logo.

Start with a bias-cut slip dress, the heart of the label. The brand is built around dresses constructed to follow the body's contours, and recurring elements include bustier construction, visible stitching details and crochet inserts. A slip dress is the clearest expression of the house tagline, Dress for pleasure.

Anna October is a Ukrainian womenswear designer and the founder of her eponymous brand, born on 31 December 1990 in Zaporizhzhia, Ukraine. She studied fine art at the Grekov Odesa Art School after earning a diploma in pattern cutting and tailoring, and she has been based in Paris since 2022. Her work is known for lingerie-inspired silhouettes and bias cut construction.

It's a real family name with a striking origin. The designer's surname derives from her grandfather, who was given the name Октябрь (October) after the October Revolution of 1917. So the label carries a piece of Ukrainian family history in its very name.

Production has stayed in Ukraine. The brand maintains its production in Ukraine, employing the same network of hand-knitters for nearly a decade, and collections use deadstock textiles with a significant share of pieces handcrafted using reimagined artisanal techniques. The hand-knitting draws on traditions rooted in Ukrainian textile heritage.

Her Spring/Summer 2023 collection, Anna's Pleasure Garden, featured hand-knitted elements produced by a cooperative of older Ukrainian craftswomen the designer affectionately calls the babushka mafia. These artisans preserve traditional textile techniques while also working with major European fashion houses, and the collection drew on folk motifs from the Ivan Honchar Museum of folk culture in Kyiv.

Profoundly. In February 2022, following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, October fled Kyiv, spending a week on the roads evading conflict zones before reaching Bucharest and ultimately settling in Paris. On arrival she presented her Autumn/Winter 2022 collection during Paris Fashion Week, and she co-founded a fashion-designer division of a platform to help Ukrainian creatives displaced by the war.

Yes. She was a finalist for the LVMH Prize in 2014, won the Mercedes-Benz Prize for Best Designer in 2016, and in 2022 was named to the BoF 500, the index of people shaping the global fashion industry. That arc marks her as one of the most recognized emerging designers to come out of Ukraine.

She did, twice. In December 2023 October launched her first collaboration with J.Crew, an 18-piece holiday capsule featuring slip dresses, sequined pieces, feathered tops and tailored separates. A second, summer-focused J.Crew x Anna October capsule of 12 pieces followed in June 2024, making her aesthetic available to a wider audience.

Her dresses have a notable following. Designs by Anna October have been worn by Hailey Bieber, Alexa Chung and Serena Williams, among others. That mix of fashion and culture figures speaks to the brand's reach beyond its Ukrainian and Parisian base.

The label is stocked widely at the luxury level. Her collections are carried in over 40 retailers worldwide, including SSENSE, Galeries Lafayette, Moda Operandi and Farfetch. That broad stockist network makes the brand reasonably accessible despite its artisanal, small-batch production.