Melke SS27 Walks Us Through the Garden
Photography by Khalil Covington
Melke’s Emma Gage is coming back to earth. The designer’s latest collection, The Garden, is inspired by one grandmother’s flower garden and the other’s vegetable garden.
If you’re familiar with Melke (inspired by Gage’s Minnesotan roots and thus pronounced like /Mel•K/), you know that the sense of peace and calm imbued by a garden is a significant departure from a brand that for years described itself as “seriously unhinged.”
As recently as last season’s “Gone Fishing,” the brand’s hero products included tops, dresses, and pants finished with multi-colored fishing lures, plus a skirt and purse finished with red-and-white fishing bobbers.
“When I first started, there were a lot of maximalist and expressive elements,” Gage says, in between shooting lookbook pictures of her SS27 collection in a loft in Times Square. “I still love to bring those elements in, but in a way that’s more of a breath of fresh air rather than a punch in your face.”
The more refined Melke centers on earthy browns, greens, and blues. To ease customers into her sense of whimsy, Gage strategically used louder yellow-green plaid fabric but in classic suiting silhouettes; elsewhere, the brand’s hallmark fishing lures return, but hand-beaded onto a mature brown pinstripe fabric.
Photography by Khalil Covington
100% wool voile sourced from the Netherlands provides the light, airy, and elevated backdrop for Gage’s playful embroidery, attached via simple whipstitch and then hand-beaded to infuse the garments with a sense of craft.
“I’ve learned a lot about the customer and what silhouettes work, but I’ve also learned a lot about how to maintain your brand’s aura and essence without overdoing it,” she says, now 31, who started her brand at 25 during the pandemic.
Case in point: the collection’s standout pieces feature natural emu feathers springing from sheer separates. Here, depth comes from the garment’s inherent sense of movement—plus the customer’s agency in choosing whether to style the separates with nude basics or, say, a pair of yellow-green plaid suit pants if they’re feeling bold.
Gage says learning to trust her intuition has been a journey, but it was worth it to arrive at a point where she can now transition to focus more on the business side of her brand. “Not forcing it, allowing the brand to breathe,” Gage says. That’s when the new growth blooms.
