A small American atelier founded on the belief that clothing should be considered, made well, and kept.
In the autumn of 2020, Alisha Hall began sewing a single camel wool coat at her kitchen table in Walker County, Alabama. She had spent ten years working in fashion in New York and Atlanta — first as a buyer, then as a small-batch pattern maker — and she had grown quietly tired of clothes that were neither beautiful nor built to last.
The coat took eleven weeks. When it was finished, three friends asked her to make one for them. Evelyn & Iris — named for her grandmothers — began that winter, with a hand-painted sign on a converted potting shed and a list of fifteen names.
Today, the atelier is a thirteen-hundred-square-foot studio on Victoria Road. We employ four full-time makers and one very patient golden retriever. We make about three thousand garments a year — less than some boutiques sell in a weekend — and we ship them to women in all fifty states.
We release four small collections a year. Each contains 16 to 22 pieces, all designed to layer with what came before.
We start every piece with a swatch. If the fabric isn't right, the piece doesn't get made. It's the simplest rule we have, and the hardest to keep.
Every Evelyn & Iris garment comes with free lifetime mending. Send it back, we'll repair it, and we'll send it home.
Alisha grew up in Walker County and learned to sew at her grandmother Evelyn's kitchen table at age nine. She studied apparel design at the University of Alabama, spent three years at a buying office in New York, and was a senior pattern-maker at a well-known Brooklyn label before returning home in 2019.
"I wanted to make the clothes I used to look for and couldn't find," she says. "Pieces a woman could wear to her daughter's wedding and to the grocery store the next morning. Pieces she would still be wearing in twenty years."
She lives in Nauvoo with her husband, her two daughters, and the aforementioned golden retriever, Ruth.
— Vivienne Westwood, a favorite of ours.
