Jessica Kayll looks exactly like the kind of woman you’d imagine designs silk robes for a living. She is effortlessly composed, with a face that belongs in a John Singer Sargent portrait. The walls of her New York studio are pinned with watercolor sketches, Pantone chips, pressed botanicals and old-world interiors; a sort of greenhouse for the senses. Tables are crowded with brushes, pigment tubes and the occasional teacup, a painterly mess of florals and fabric scraps. Orchids and eucalyptus trail from the corners like punctuation marks. There’s no pretense of showroom polish.
In 2020, the British-born designer launched her eponymous brand in London with a dozen silk kimono robes whose silhouettes float between garment and artifact. The prints were Kayll’s own, meticulously painted in her studio, then digitally printed onto silk using azo-free dyes. They were technically resortwear—but not the kind that flies first class to Tulum and dies an Instagram death by New Year’s Eve.
“I don’t think of them as resortwear,” Kayll politely corrects Observer. The collection has expanded over the last five years into blouses, trousers, dresses and bathing suits. KAYLL’s ethos, however, remains unchanged: the prints are always the point. Magnolia blossoms unravel across sunset-orange silk like they’ve been painted directly onto the body. Crimson and coral explode against noir backdrops on collared blouses. Her blue-and-white floral kimono conjures Delftware on vacation—formal in composition, relaxed in effect. Fluid, never floppy. Nothing is garish. Everything is intentional, and feels less like fashion than an illustrated diary of garden fantasy. “When you’re doing these long, silk, gorgeous robes, there’s a large opportunity for beautiful surface design on the product,” she says. “They’re very, very easy to wear, and they’re very versatile. You could wear them in the city, as eveningwear, at home with coffee.”
Before bringing her own brand to the world, Kayll was a textile designer for haute couture houses with no shortage of grandeur—trailblazers of maximalism like Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. What stuck about those experiences wasn’t the drama, but the discipline: how much time and care was poured into every embroidered detail, every print and every piece of tailoring. “Instead of making clothes for quick sales,” she explains, “I wanted to carry forward the concept of designing as a creative art form; labor-intensive, with love.”
Kayll speaks with the grounded calm of someone who’s spent a lifetime observing beauty and learning how to distill it. She is low-key, but never aloof. Her tone is considered but not rehearsed, the way a painter might articulate mixing colors, not trying to sell you the art, just explaining what she did and why. There is no rush, no self-congratulation, only a thoughtful, deliberate clarity, honed from years of trusting that if the work is good enough, it will be found. When she talks about her craft, she isn’t trying to impress. She’s explaining a belief system. “Culture swings like a pendulum,” she says. “But we’ve never seen it swing so far. Trends used to last a season. Now they last a week.”
Her first production partner, a carbon-neutral atelier in East London, took months to find. Kayll knew she wanted the facility to be hyperlocal, in order to visit easily while production was underway—something she was used to doing in past roles. But, as one factory tour after the next revealed unsanitary and unethical working conditions, she started to lose hope. Kayll already knew her profit margins would be low, but was shocked to discover how much of an open secret it was that, even in London, where designers pay a premium for production, so many facilities were so poorly run. This was nothing like the trips she took to Como for McQueen. “I was appalled by how bad some of the conditions were,” she says. “You wouldn’t expect it in the U.K., but the facilities were messy, crowded, steaming hot, fabric everywhere—full of safety hazards. And no one seemed even remotely ashamed. It was hard to believe they weren’t putting on more of a facade.”
The factory she ultimately selected runs on renewable energy, pays above London’s living wage, and reroutes fabric waste into utilitarian second lives. It’s not sexy. It’s not cheap. But it’s clean, and it lets Kayll sleep at night. “I was not willing to create a brand that I felt was making a negative impact on the world.” That clarity has been her compass, but she’s not naive about the environment she operates in. Her business model is slow by design.
Six weeks later, Kayll landed her first retail account at Splash Paris, a premium resortwear trade show at the end of Couture Fashion Week. Boutiques in London, Zurich, Amsterdam, Paris and New York now carry the brand—but her footprint has remained intentionally small. In late 2024, Kayll relocated to New York, planting a more permanent flag following a successful Nolita pop-up, with a bare-bones team of herself and three freelancers. It wasn’t about splashy stateside conquest. It was about proving that slow fashion could hold its own in the city that never waits. Kayll regularly rejects wholesale demands for pre-fall, pre-resort and all the other micro-seasons that now form the pulse of retail. Designers are pressured by a “very online” influence to deliver quick drops following trends that vanish in weeks and are replaced just as quickly. “We don’t exist to play that game,” Kayll says. “It’s simply a no. It’s not something that we participate in. Ethical brands can’t compete with those markets.”
Her refusal is as much about principles as it is about branding. KAYLL is for women who believe in buying fewer things, but better ones. It’s for women who care about how a garment was made (ethically, in London) and who likely have a point of view about both sustainability and aesthetics. Kayll talks about her customers with empathy, and is clear that she designs for them, not for herself—a distinction that might seem small, but in fashion, is tectonic. The customer is cultured, yes, but not performatively so. “I design clothing that will stand the test of time,” she says. “That, to me, is conscious consumerism.”
It’s a phrase that’s been drained of meaning through overuse. But Kayll earns the right to say it. Fabric is sourced responsibly. Swimwear is made from ECONYL, a nylon regenerated from ocean plastic. Every decision has a provenance. There’s a recurring pattern in how she communicates: observe, assess, refine. She doesn’t traffic in jargon or over-intellectualize her process, never overstates her role and rarely indulges in hyperbole. If anything, she keeps things refreshingly grounded.
Even the Met Gala—where Kayll appeared earlier this year, a riot of orchids, lilacs and allium blooming from her neckline—is discussed with a shrug. It wasn’t a coronation. It was a moodboard, “a visual feast.” Her shoes were crowned in petals, and her purse was not so much carried as gathered like a bouquet. A woman dressed to charm, on her own botanical terms. “It’s not about the Met Gala,” she clarifies when asked about the experience. “It’s about making something that contributes positively to the world. I don’t think there will ever be a moment where I’ll feel like I’ve ‘made it,’ no matter how big the brand gets. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel that.”
It’s tempting to cast Kayll as an antidote to the influencer economy. But she doesn’t buy that narrative, either. “I believe that the appreciation of beautiful craftsmanship is a response to fast fashion,” she says. “I’d love to have a crystal ball that says fast fashion will disappear. But I don’t think that’s the case.”
