Pre-fall collections are a designer’s fork in the road: do you lean into fall, even if pieces are on the retail floor in the summer, or step into the now, creating for the needs of the hottest months of the year?

“The pieces are light and airy,” Daniella Kallmeyer shared, explaining that her fabrications are meant for a summer wardrobe.  “I envisioned this woman as like a city girl going to India or Morocco.  Not where everybody else is going.”

A Kallmeyer vacation wardrobe isn’t about cutoff shorts and logo Ts; it’s a languid new “foundation” evolving her designs with sumptuous textures. “They’re textures that you feel. It’s not just textures that you see,” she said of burlap-like knits with a hint of transparency, a silk dress with unfinished frayed edges or a floor-length rollneck knit dress.

Over the past couple seasons she’s explored bits of sportiness, which show up here in an oil slick black windbreaker with metal sewn in, giving it a rumpled yet geometric shape — and a no-brainer when packing.

Kallmeyer’s pieces come alive on the body. The designer often speaks of gestures and the meaning they imbue in a garment, and pre-fall sees her musing around the combination of shapes, such as a tank fitted to the body worn with a fabric sash as a belt (a great styling trick seen on several looks) and wide-leg pant, or a triangle-shaped white shirtdress.

Suiting and pants continue to expand with new ideas, paired with one of her artisanal belts. “We’ve got such a good pants business that it becomes like a gift with purchase,” she quipped. “We sell belts like crazy.”

Fresh off a 2025 CFDA nomination, an experience she says was validating, she is thinking long term: “I want my customers shopping a Kallmeyer wardrobe, same way that she did in Donna Karan or Calvin Klein back in the day, the same way Ralph Lauren has created a world. We’re doing the same thing.”