FASHION

CATALINA BY CASSAI

Fashion, homewear and linens for the home, with original prints and all the color of the Mediterranean.

Catalina by Cassai dresses people and homes with the same eye, one that is deeply Mediterranean, handmade and very personal. It started in Ses Salines, in the south of Mallorca, and today it brings together things most brands would keep in separate stores: bathrobes, crochet bags, printed blouse-and-skirt sets, pajamas you can wear out, jewelry, and linens for the table and the rest of the house. What ties it all together is color, prints designed in-house, and the idea that luxury shouldn't be saved for what you wear when you go out. It belongs just as much in how you have breakfast, how you rest, and how you set the table when friends come over.

Behind it is Catalina, its founder, who started the brand after her divorce, when she decided to finally go after something she'd wanted since she was a girl: to be a designer. She grew up around fabric, since her mother taught fashion, pattern-making and sewing, and over the years that inheritance picked up everything she found while traveling, from colors and textiles to other ways of seeing beauty. She says the brand didn't come out of a business plan but out of a very personal need to create again and begin a new chapter, which is why it looks so much like her. She doesn't design only for what will sell; she designs from what moves her.

Each collection starts with whatever she comes across during the year, whether that's art, fashion, design, other cultures or the colors of the Mediterranean. The team takes photos, gathers pieces and references, builds moodboards, and that's where the palettes and prints come from. They also pay close attention to what their clients choose, so the most-loved pieces stay and come back each season in new prints. Among her references, Catalina always goes back to Klimt, especially his portrait of Emilie Flöge, where painting, fashion and a very strong feminine presence share the same canvas.

The thing with this brand is how clearly it has drawn its lines. It has no interest in mass production or in collections that look the same from one store to the next, and what it protects most is that the piece you receive is the one you were promised. Fabrics, materials and finishes are all checked, and when a shipment arrives below the quality they expect, it goes back, even if that means delays or higher costs. What makes it recognizable, and what anyone with a good eye picks up right away, is the way it mixes color: bright, joyful, well-balanced combinations that, together with the original prints, give each collection its identity.

The first thing you notice is the color, and then the texture, because these are fabrics you want to touch. Everything carries something of a Mediterranean house, with late-afternoon light, cool clean sheets and the scent of jasmine drifting in from the garden. Where it makes the most sense is the bathrobe, right after a hot shower, when the bathroom is still steamy and your skin still smells like soap: you wrap yourself in the cotton, tie it, and stretch that moment out a little longer. The print adds a touch of fantasy, as if you were traveling without leaving home, and over time you realize a piece like that says something about you, even if no one else sees it.

One table sums it up well. For Carmina's birthday, Catalina and her team wanted a table that held all the light of a Mallorcan summer, and they started with the brand's table linens, building a palette of yellows that ran from butter to lemon to sunflower. The dinner was at a house that, as Catalina tells it, was designed by John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin, with huge earth-toned walls, a vertical opening that framed the landscape and a courtyard open to the sky. The tablecloths fell almost to the floor, and on top of them the runners and napkins played with different scales of print within the same family of yellows. In the center went sunflowers in a low, generous arrangement, some fully open and others still closed, with lemons tucked among the leaves to carry the color of the linens. They left room for the plates, for resting your hands and for easy conversation, because for Catalina a table has to be irresistible at first sight and comfortable for all the hours you'll spend at it.

As evening fell they lit the candles, the walls turned warmer and the light started bouncing off the glasses. Carmina walked over slowly, ran her hand across the tablecloth and lifted a napkin to look at the print up close. Catalina says that gesture is her favorite, someone discovering exactly the details they cared about most, and she likes to picture Carmina years later, laying out that same tablecloth for her friends, maybe in another house, somewhere else in the world.

Catalina by Cassai connects with a woman somewhere between her thirties and her sixties, worldly, curious and with a point of view of her own. She might run a business, be an architect, work in a creative field or have her own project. She travels, goes to exhibitions, loves places with personality, and chooses a dress, a work of art or the pieces she sets her table with the same care. She likes color, lets herself play, and has a bit of the collector in her, as likely to fall for a bag because of its design as for a bathrobe because of how it makes her feel on a morning at home. It isn't for anyone who sees that freedom with color and print as out of place, or who doesn't value the work behind it.

Catalina describes herself as very ambitious about this project, but in no hurry. She doesn't want the brand to be everywhere, only in the right places and with the right people, and she wants it to still have a soul ten years from now. For her, success won't be about making it huge. It will be about making it unforgettable.