Founder, creative and editorial director Catharine Dahm quietly launched her namesake, luxury concept fashion label, Dahm House, in Paris this 12 months. 

Dahm hails from Indiana and moved to Paris after cutting her teeth within the industry as the previous cofounder of sustainable, contemporary label Rabot. Dahm Home is her debut independent and self-funded brand (she’s currently began fundraising for Collection 02’s fall and spring 2025 lines). 

The Dahm House debut Collection 01, “Welcome to Earth,” was designed to “have fun the art of craft and inventive storytelling” with ready-to-wear designed and sourced in Paris. The 26-piece fall collection brings forth the concept of “beauty, fragility and graceful circularity of life,” through handcrafted details, thematic symbols, natural hues and materials. 

“For me, design is so personal and I wanted each collection to be centered around a theme,” Dahm said. Each of her inaugural, heirloom-minded collections (set to release for fall and spring) will encompass the concept of storytelling, further expanded upon with coinciding Dahm House magazines. The debut Collection 01 magazine, distributed internationally by KD Presse, includes a mixture of writing, poetry and editorial photo stories. “I don’t want it to feel like a list; it’s really its own universe. Especially for a luxury brand, it makes it easier for people to buy and be a part of the world.”

Dahm’s luxury ready-to-wear balances a timeless ethos with a play on the masculine versus feminine in structure and fabrication, however the unexpected delight of her styles shine through their sensual-meets-whimsical details.

Dahm said she loved the concept of, “I dreamt I used to be a flower — as if someone was dreaming and morphing into these flower shapes,” which resulted in blooming, three-dimensional florals, as seen as shapely trousers hems; on the breasts of tailored tops and “Hunzicker” dress (in wool or raw-edged, silk organza), and in the shape of hand-painted petal sleeves and collars of her brown cotton sateen menswear “Harding” shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons and silk satin duchess piping.

“I do have this Paris-Indiana as a part of the brand because I feel prefer it sounds charming. I’m using that because the tag for every thing and I’m planning to shoot my second collection there [in Indiana] — I feel like you may have to include your roots a bit of bit,” said Dahm, adding garments are named after women in her life, equivalent to the petal-hemmed “Linda” pants, named after her grandmother who had the rule modified at her daughter’s school to enable girls to wear pants as a substitute of skirts. “That’s what I mean once I say design to me is so personal — I would like to pay homage to those that encourage these garments.”

A powerful throughline of the gathering is her use of hand-embroidered natural glass, beads and stones as built-in jewelry — a nod to the gathering’s esoteric ideas of life and evolution.

“There’s a tremendous shop within the third [arrondissement], it’s like Harry Potter’s shop with floor-to-ceiling boxes of all vintage glass beads. I actually have lots of glass Murano beads from Italy in the gathering — the detachable sleeves have vintage Murano glass. They’re really timeless, elevated and sensual details…if you may have an excessive amount of that it may easily be overwhelming, however it invites you to take a look at things and produce you closer,” she said. Throughout the gathering, customers are invited closer to watch her hand-beaded spirals made from lapis, malachite, pearl, jasper and lemon quartz, to call a couple of. The motifs will be seen on the busts of her structured corset tops and dresses, which nicely offer a balance between the playful and sensual. 

“This dress is so sexy on — it has a corset body and really takes this theme of evolution with Malachite on the female side of the body for earthy energy and grounding; Lapis on the masculine side for air and sky energy. No one’s going to take a look at that dress and think, ‘Oh, masculine energy,’ however it’s personal. I don’t ever want anything to feel too custom — it must feel refined, and has a touch of caprice,” she said of the tailored black wool “Yireh” corset dress with front slits and contrast stitching.

Other details throughout the gathering stem from the concept of convertibility, as seen through hook-and-eye closures on tops; outerwear, jeans and trousers with button-up-or-down, -on-or-off accents, and long, wrappable ties on blouses and dresses.

Approaching Collection 01 as an organic launch and “marketing collection,” Dahm sells direct-to-consumer via her website under the preorder model (with a made-to-order time-frame of 4 weeks) with prices starting from $265 to $4,478. The founder and inventive sees the Dahm House customer akin to the Bode crowd — “clever, intelligent women who’re working in industries equivalent to architecture, publishing, design — those that have an appreciation for style and need to speculate in clothing that also feels relevant, feels modern, but that they will have and ideally keep for a very long time.”

Since debuting Collection 01 via e-commerce, she noted customers have responded well to her “conversation between structure and fluidity with these little nodes of beauty on top.” 

“In addition they just like the teetering between the poetry of feminine and masculine, yin-yang,” she said. For example, the Dahm Blazer (a one-piece wool and silk black blazer with dickie-like cotton and silk vest and mother-of-pearl closure) atop the Costello skirt; other favorites were noted because the Claire, Aline and Catharine tops; Leonard pants, and coats.

“First impressions are so vital. I’ve been spending lots of time and resources on ensuring every thing feels personal because I would like the primary touch point for a buyer, for press, for purchasers to essentially understand what I’m attempting to do and never feel like ‘after three seasons, she’s got it discovered.’ Because truthfully, lots of the time you simply get one shot; even too, I understand it often takes a couple of seasons for people to achieve traction, and I would like there to still be a primary collection that’s strong like proof of record.”

Dahm plans to evolve this model over the subsequent few years into an atelier model, where garments will likely be personally fitted for clients. As well as, she’s going to unveil her spring 2024 collection — an expansion of her “smart tailoring with unexpected poetic touches” — to wholesale for the primary time during Paris Fashion Week. 

“Spring 2024 will likely be Collection 01, ‘Welcome to Earth,’ Part 2. The concept is that every collection lives for a full calendar 12 months and is split into fall and spring, with a magazine launching yearly to coincide with each collection to expand the storytelling. This can allow the silhouettes and storytelling to construct/flourish for a full 12 months as a substitute of too quickly folding right into a recent collection each 4 to 6 months,” Dahm said.