You can’t read a book by its cover, nor a collection by its title. Such is the case with Andrea Mary Marshall’s offering for fall 2025. She named it Elizabeth, but it’s all the stronger for being a less than literal homage to the famous English monarch. As such, it marked a step forward from the fledgling designer’s more singularly focused spring outing.
After graduating from Parsons, Marshall developed a fine art practice based in self-portraiture, while working in the fashion industry. They “were the kind of jobs that I didn’t have to get too attached to, I could just check in and check out,” she said at a preview. “I’d cry in the bathroom all day and then I’d go home and do my art. But I have this weird extensive production knowledge because of that.” She put it to good use when in 2021 she launched Salon 1884 exclusively with Neiman Marcus. (The name references the exhibition in which John Singer Sargent’s “Portrait of Madame X” made its scandalous debut.)
Salon 1884 is a polished brand delivering tailoring in exclusive fabrics, perfect black dresses (in a nod to Sargent’s subject), and a touch of kink. Marshall’s desire to explore dramatic silhouettes sometimes took her in the direction of the 1980s. Still, she wasn’t satisfied. Salon, Marshall explained, represents her personal, minimalist style; “it’s what I would wear, but it is not what comes out of me,” is how she put it. And so she decided to go back to the nuts and bolts of design and study pattern-making. With that knowledge, Marshall said, “I can make the clothes that I’ve always wanted to make. Making the patterns changed my life, really.” And thus the Andrea Mary Marshall brand was born.
Conjuring The Virgin Queen in the midst of a manosphere moment takes bravura. While there are dresses using 30-plus yards of starched lace and corset busques in the offering, it’s not at all sweet. Neither, of course, was the monarch. Citing Roy Strong’s book on Elizabeth, Marshall explained that HRH often wore black because it “was the most expensive color, but it was also what men wore. A draped rain-resistant shaved cotton trench with cut-and-slashed sleeves revealing their Loro Piana plaid cashmere linings, certainly has swagger. The most Elizabethan looks are a black strapless “Lilibet dress” with its fanning Chantilly lace collar and pearl adornments, and the lace-edged “Izzie” bodice that curtsies to Vivienne Westwood, one of the queens of British fashion. Marshall nodded to another fashion royal with a take on Zandra Rhodes’s 1977 Conceptual Chic collection featuring safety pinned dresses, only these were made using custom fastenings and many yards of hand-knotted pearls.
There are many Britishisms in this collection—trench coats, brothel creepers, punk studs, New Romantic lace—but what makes it sing are the unexpected, and feminized, Teddy Boy influences. There’s a jacket with the surprise of ivory satin lapels and lace dripping from its Western-style seaming, and a plaid suit jacket with beautifully constructed shoulders and a busk front. The tailoring has a not-quite shrunken fit, a boyish counterpart to the femme fatale shape of some of the dresses, a number of which are in a custom leopard alpaca that Marshall described as having a ’90 Kate Moss vibe but which also hark back to QEI.
“I used to draw these pictures of Elizabeth where she was half-god and half-Elizabeth, and so I wanted her to have this animalistic quality,” Marshall said. “I felt like there needed to be something that was exaggerating her and making her larger than life.” This collection may very well whet your appetite to take on this dog-eat-dog world in a big way.
