Emerging Dallas Fashion Brand Eve & Max Finds a Permanent Home at Grange Hall
A Cool Shop for Ambitious Designs
BY Billy Fong // 04.08.24As part of a permanent residency at Grange Hall, Eve & Max unveils Namaloon, its third collection of women’s luxe ready-to-wear. Eve & Max was launched in 2021 by Dallas entrepreneur Maxine Trowbridge (a graduate of the London College of Fashion who later worked at British women’s ready-to-wear luxury brand Mansfield) with Paris-based co-creative director Samudra Hartanto (former senior womenswear designer at Jean Paul Gaultier, Hermès, and Louis Vuitton). The cornerstone of Eve & Max — which is named for Trowbridge and two grandmothers who shared the name Eve — is sustainability.
Seasonless collections are presented annually, driven by a simple mantra: Style should be consciously ethical, effortlessly beautiful, and endlessly artful.
Each Eve & Max collection is a collaboration with a leading artist. For 2024, they chose Dallas-based Ambreen Butt, a Pakistani-American visionary whose work has been seen in solo exhibitions at museums around the U.S. Her work combines feminist views with global politics and the experiences of a Muslim living in the U.S. The work that inspired the Eve & Max collection, Namaloom (Untitled #4), 2020, means “unknown” in Urdu and is from the series “Say My Name” (2017 – 2020). Indiscernible black text painted on tea-stained paper represents the dichotomy of lightness and darkness, beautiful and broken, negative and positive, and the evolution of the unknown to the known.
The spark for the Grange Hall residency ignited last summer when Rajan Patel, co-founder of Grange Hall, was sitting with Trowbridge at a party at Zoe Bonnette’s home. Trowbridge shared the vision of her next collection; the rest is history in the making.