Mati Hays is the lead designer, creative director, and whatever other jargon applies for House of Iconica, her independent fashion label built around my favorite B-word: bespoke. In a fashion era that feels toothless, the designer bites down hard with bias-cut dresses, cut and sew everything, and applique out the wazoo. “I DO NOT OWN TSHIRTS OR JEANS OR SWEATSHIRTS OR SWEATPANTS OR UGGS OR FLAT SHOES OR SOCKS,” reads an Instagram grid post by the designer, featuring a photo of a woman’s waist squeezed impossibly small by a black corset. During the spring of 2022, Hays posted the above manifesto on Instagram, to the chagrin of those who, simply, aren’t as ’bout it as she. Not only has she led the charge on reconstructing gowns for the Met in collaboration with fellow designer and friend Conner Ives, but look no further than the New York City Ballet’s advertorial for their Fall 2024–Spring 2025 season to find custom costumes courtesy of the one and only House of Iconica.

Aptly, Hays’s homebase for HOI is, well, iconic. The art deco-inspired haven is tucked away in the heart of Brooklyn; its walls are impeccably wallpapered, its ceiling is painted her own custom shade of red, and the carpet looks like zebra print on acid. When I visited Hays’s salon last summer, she showed me the closest she’s gotten to violating her no-flat-shoes rule: a pair of Martine Rose wedge sneaker mules made in collaboration with Nike. “If they fit, you can have them,” she told me—but frankly, I was too inspired by her manifesto to accept (they were also a half-size too big).

In the midst of perhaps the greatest wardrobe flop of my life (I have not had that shit on recently), I re-visited my voice notes app and came across a recording from that summer day I spent at the House of Iconica salon, an extended afternoon spent sipping Diet Coke and mind-melding with Mati. We rapped about the ’60s, the poetics of taste, and how the internet shouldn’t have the power to make you care about things. Here, I’ve rescued the three hour recording from the digital archive, and have condensed it and edited for clarity.

Mati Hays: I’m all about evening jackets, and I’m honestly also like, fuck the scene. I just wanna wear my evening jackets in peace.

Maya Kotomori: Tell me about the scene.

Mati: I get a lot of respect from people because I demand respect. My thing is just, like, looking really uppity—it’s not something people do to be cool, to look cool. I’ve always been about a nice, tailored everything: Your clothes fit. I like to look elongated and swan neck and all of that. When I was really young, like, 11, all I wanted to wear was a DVF wrap dress. My mom had a knockoff one from Kohl’s, and I’d put it on and be like I’m wearing this to school! And she’s like ‘No you’re fucking not,’ because it was so sexy.

Maya: I would wear a true, sensible heel sophomore year of high school, like a classy 2.5-inch block heel, and people would be like, ‘Why are you wearing librarian shoes?’ I was like, ‘You wouldn’t know that in 2013, the year of our lord, librarian is very happening right now.’ I had the mentality like, ‘You losers wouldn’t even think about this! And that’s fine, you guys wear your hoodies.’ I was an athlete so I truly was always a bitch who did both, but you can always tell when someone feels good in their clothes, when someone genuinely doesn’t care, and when people are trying very hard to look like they don’t care. I feel like when people are trying really hard to hit a TikTok sort of thing, it’s the biggest hallmark that someone has no taste, and no sense of personal style.

Mati: I’m bringing something back from my own history. Backstory: I used to work at the Wolf dress-form factory in 2019. I found the job on Craigslist. I went in for an interview down at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, this 100 year old factory. The woman interviewing me explained that their lead seamstress who was there for 40 years died of pneumonia. All of a sudden there was no one there to carry on her work because Wolf was already outsourcing labor to the Philippines, they were making all their money doing custom mannequins for celebrities and those who could pay. I’m getting this story and all this history while I’m expecting just to do a sit-down interview, but they take me into a workroom full of half-done mannequins and shit—they’re like, ‘Do you think you could do this?’ and I’m like, ‘Yep.’ Just lying my fucking ass off. So I made one mannequin, and I was hired on the spot.

Maya: There’s not a lot of respect for people outside of, like, Paris, Milan, London, New York—even though they’re the labor. Technically, per capita, the Global South has the highest fashion output on Earth, and people don’t want to hear that. Outsourcing is an active choice from these labels to be able to increase profit margins, at the cost of construction and specialness, and we do not talk about it.

Mati: The quality of a mass-produced garment is just not even comparable. While there are skilled seamstresses in the Philippines, what they’re doing is completely different to what the lead seamstress was doing, what I was doing, or what they came up with in the factory. They came in one day and told my assistant and I that we had two weeks, so I was like, Let’s make all of our own clothes using their materials while we have ’em. I’m reissuing a dress I made back then. It’s a tube dress made out of medical cotton, the stuff they use in body casts, which we’d use to smooth out the mannequin patterns before putting cotton muslin tailored to the shape, and sewn up the side. The tube dresses have stencils on them like the mannequins so we know what size they are. I made like 40 of these during the height of Club Glam at China Chalet, and so many people wanted them from an Instagram post I made that I was like, I’m going to Club Glam, I will be there with a Mood bag full of these. I have all these photos of people going into the bathroom to try them on.

Maya: It’s cute to have them all marked different sizes, too, for different people.

Mati: Nope, they’re all marked size 0 no matter the size of the person. These look amazing on so many different shapes, why should the number matter?

Maya: I stand corrected. And that’s brilliant.

Mati: They’re fitting into my fantasy right now. Alongside the ’60s, boho-esque dresses, my ongoing couture collection that is being made and built over a long period is inspired by 1967–1972, the military-esque of the Vietnam War, both the anti-war movement, and actual military garb. I’m doing a bandolier, a brooch.

Maya: What is a bandolier?

Mati: The criss-cross thing worn across the chest that holds bullets or other ammo.

Maya: The ’60s changed everything. The silhouettes of dresses were more free, everything was much shorter with the miniskirt.

Mati: I was in a Mary Quant-era, where I was doing a sort of survey of early ’60s, mid-’60s atomic styles that could be more boxy, and the miniskirt revolution was a huge part of that. I want to push myself and go more into these flowy, Ossie Clark/Zandra Rhodes [silhouettes], which I never approached at first because I thought it was obvious for me as a designer because that’s essentially what I wear—these ’20s, ’30s, ’40s-style bias cuts.

I hadn’t gotten into Ossie Clark at all, nor did I know anything about him. He just popped into my mind last week, and I started researching. My first capsule collection was inspired by mods versus rockers, where both of these components of style were clashing—not as in style, but in a social way that I could [articulate] in fashion. Then you get all these early glam rock styles, per my Ossie research. People called him a rockstar, because he was in with Bianca and Mick Jagger, and he only had a short lived career because he was an addict who literally lived fast, died young. Well, he was murdered, but…

Maya: Not to romanticize dying young, but…hard.

Mati: I have to send you this article from AnOther. It quotes Ossie saying, “I design dresses that don’t have any undergarments associated with them so you can have sex anywhere, anytime.” You know, this is the misogynistic redo of [’70s feminism], like he was telling all his models to take off their undergarments, they’re all freaked out—but he was like, ‘No, this is vicious, and vicious is the vision.’ And he was pre-Biba. There’s so little info on him, but from what I’ve read he was very popular on the West Coast. These tiny little stores would sell $300,000 worth of his stuff a year.He rocked that for 10–15 years and then he was living in government housing and just poor as fuck, forgotten completely. In 1996, he was murdered in his apartment by a 28-year-old gay lover on an amphetamine bender, who just came and stabbed him 37 times and crushed his skull with a pot.

Anyways… I’m just about done with the design aspect of the collection, and will have elements that you can get a dress or a skirt for like $500, rather than $3,000 for a fully bespoke dress. I’m hoping to do the mannequin dresses in black with white writing on it in addition to the white ones.

“Don’t get me wrong, everybody wants to be cool, and that’s something that I have distaste for—coolness. I never wanted to be cool, I’ve always wanted to wow people. There’s a huge difference there, that’s where I come from with exclusivity.”

Maya: Do you have plans for advertising? Because right now I feel like the HOI girl is any girl who actually cares about clothing, which unfortunately is very rare, but also very broad.

Mati: I’m trying to work with somebody on PR, and she’s asking me, ‘Who’s the girl?’ and I just don’t even think you can pinpoint anything like that anymore. People are so aware of different types of women through imagery—both happening currently, but also throughout history—that they aspire to. They’re able to change themselves at any given point very easily, just because of that access. There are so many fashion designers nowadays too. I don’t really have an answer to who the girl is. I’ve always just tried to bend people’s minds. I think that there’s power over influence and integrity, that I think is just something that is going to grow with every day that I’m evolving. People are seeing that and are aspiring to watch me. My boyfriend’s like, ‘Well, you’re the face of the brand. You’re the girl, and you’re showing other women how to do it.’

Maya: Fuck, marry, kill: TikTok, accessibility as a term and also as a practice, and The Smiths.

Mati: Marry The Smiths. Fuck TikTok. And kill accessibility. It sounds terrible, but I think that what comes to mind about accessibility is exclusivity going out the door, and that’s not what I do.

Maya: Because fashion isn’t accessible, nor has it ever been intended to be accessible. Any effort to make fashion accessible will not only make it not fashion, but it will manipulate people. Fast fashion wins when fashion is accessible.

Mati: That’d be my answer. I shoot for a more exclusive niche. The word exclusive doesn’t mean elitist.

Maya: Right. Exclusive means a specific person with niche tastes, not a ‘you can only have this if you can afford it’ rule.

Mati: I just think that people want to have their hands in 26 buckets, just because they can—like the girl I mentioned who can change at any given time. It’s not like that girl is truly inspired, right? She changes because she saw something cool, and she wants to be cool more than anything. Don’t get me wrong, everybody wants to be cool, and that’s something that I have distaste for—coolness. I never wanted to be cool, I’ve always wanted to wow people. There’s a huge difference there, that’s where I come from with exclusivity. You shouldn’t be able to copy Meg [superstarprincess] because you see her images and you follow her and she might follow you back, and feel like you have ownership of her. That’s literally why I’m a designer. Like, if you want my look so badly, you can buy it from me.

Even after doing my first collection, I got all these ads for tops that look exactly like the tops that I made. I don’t want to see my regurgitation a million times. These tops were inspired by ’60s Madame Greige, then McQueen did something similar in the ’90s. These [algorithm-based] brands have to be viable and be wearable, so none of them did the exact same thing as me, Greige, or McQueen, because they had to add something to make it more wearable and less fussy. It is a little bit of a fussy top to wear. Like your tit might fall out, and that’s fucking beautiful. You should touch your clothes while you’re wearing them. It’s nice to play with something bespoke in that way.

Maya: I love intentional nakedness.

Mati: You can wear this top three different ways, and it’s just fun to sit there and play with yourself.

Maya: Fashion kink, not kink fashion. And none of what these people are wearing to the ‘bondage’ parties…

Mati: I’ve been to a few, and I just get turned off by the way people look. It’s supposed to be a fetish party, I cannot look at that much fucking polyester mesh.

Maya: I spoke to my dad about this actually. He would go to underground dance parties in San Francisco when he went to [UC] Berkeley, and people would straight up get turned away from the door if they didn’t have the look. I feel like when people hear that, they think that the bouncer is vibe checking you on a racial or gender line, or on some body politic. But it wasn’t like you were only allowed in if you looked subversive, it was that you had to show some intention in coming to this party. You had to express the theme, if there was one.

Mati: [My boyfriend] Tom and I went to a bondage party just to see, and we made it a great time. When we walked up to the party, it was all winter coats and polyester… I had a whole thing going on with my look, and he’s an Italian tailored man with these beautiful men’s clothes, and the bouncer was like, ‘So how’s he gonna get in?’ And I said, ‘Just look at him. His entire look is Italian brands that you don’t even know.’ To be tailored as a man, in all black with these gorgeous tattoos: that’s fetish. I was the only one there with my whole tits out, whole ass out. It was weird.

Maya: Fetish cannot be accessible. It’s supposed to be a little bit daunting and that’s why I think there’s a decline in real innovation in fashion and in art.

Mati: That’s what fetish is about! Truly underground. You know what’s perverse? Tailoring.

Maya: You know what’s underground? House of Iconica.