AF: What made you want to open a store in Palm Beach?
JA: My husband’s grandmother was here for years and my husband’s family would come down here a lot, so we would come down a lot. It’s a market that I knew relatively well. After opening New York and the Hamptons, Palm Beach felt like the natural next step.
From the Spring/Summer 2024 collection.
AF: How do you think your Palm Beach location differs from the ones in New York or East Hampton?
JA: What I think has been eye-opening is that the client is the same. There’s no longer a truly local client who is here, or the city, or the Hamptons, 365 days a year. It’s a client who is a global traveler, who is buying wherever she is, and in that sense is very similar from location to location. In Palm Beach the weights that we’re selling are a lighter, more colorful. Our core collection of lightweight cashmeres is a no-brainer and we’re answering the same kind of needs and demands.
AF: Was there anything that surprised you about the Palm Beach client?
JA: I think that the Palm Beach client is very aware of capital F Fashion. They’re also pragmatic clients, they want to look polished and look like they are dressing in a way that’s relevant to the times that we live in. Day-to-night dressing is also really important to them. Pieces that feel versatile and pieces that feel like they can live throughout transitional weather.
AF: What is your favorite thing about Palm Beach?
JA: I think the shopping in Palm Beach is so different than anywhere else. There is a leisurely vibe to it that I find really pleasant. What I remember most from my first time coming to Palm Beach is going to the restaurants and having those models walking around with the looks or the jewelry on, like a walking billboard, and still to this day when I go to restaurants in Palm Beach, and I see that, it makes me smile. It’s so charming, and really specific to Palm Beach.
AF: How is the Spring/Summer 24 collection different from previous collections?
JA: I think the main difference from previous seasons was that after the pandemic, my perspective on fashion was really escapist. I was interested in exploring themes that had to do with other worlds or other realms. I was interested in storytelling, so mythology was something that I centered a lot of the collection around. There was always this interest in the border between reality and fiction.
AF: What is something that inspired you for this collection?
JA: I specifically went back to a film that had inspired me at the very beginning, Rosemary’s Baby. That film has always really spoken to me from a stylistic point of view. I love the commentary on female power, motherhood, women in society, there’s something really interesting about that, that’s really what the collection ended up being about.
AF: You’ve created such a wonderful and lasting presence in the fashion world, what’s next for Altuzarra?
JA: The years post-pandemic have really been a time of explosive growth for us, there’s been a really interesting renewal of the brand. I am really interested in taking some time now and really re-exploring what it means to have a 15-year-old brand in the fashion industry today. There are a lot of ways in which we’ve been doing things because they were the way that everyone did things for so long, whether it was how you showed collections or how you sold collections. We didn’t really rethink that model for a really long time and now we’re really re-evaluating that.
You can find Altuzarra’s Palm Beach store at 450 S County Road.
