DESIGNER PROFILE
Merlette
For Merlette founder Marina Cortbawi, every great garment begins with the fabric. The same thinking has shaped the brand she has spent a decade building.
MERLETTE
.webp)
WHAT THINGS
ARE
MADE OF
.webp)
MERLETTE
Fashion has become remarkably good at selling the surface. The silhouette. The colour. The campaign. The trend. The moment. What's often unnoticed is the thing that determines how a garment will feel, wear and ultimately last: what it’s made from.
For Marina Cortbawi, founder of Merlette, that isn’t just a technical consideration. It’s where every decision begins. “Good design starts with good fabric,” she says. “The fabric almost tells you what it wants to become.”
It’s a deceptively simple idea, but one that explains a great deal about Merlette.
When Cortbawi launched the brand in 2016, she was already questioning many of fashion’s accepted conventions. The traditional seasonal calendar didn’t reflect the way people actually lived. Much of the contemporary market was dominated by synthetics and clothing designed for a younger customer, while the other end of the spectrum offered beautifully made fashion at prices accessible to very few.
She saw space in between.
MERLETTE
Merlette’s first collection consisted of just twelve styles in three colours and two fabrics. Everything was lightweight, loose and washable. Cortbawi borrowed techniques more commonly associated with eveningwear and couture — embroidery, handwork, volume — and translated them into cotton pieces intended for everyday life.
The Soliman dress, part of that first collection, captured the idea particularly well. “It was about freedom, fun, volume, not showing off the body,” Cortbawi says. “It’s for the wearer, not the observer.”
That distinction still feels unusually relevant.
At a moment when clothes are increasingly designed to register on a screen, Merlette has remained focused on the experience of the person actually wearing them: how a dress moves, whether it can travel, how it feels against the body, what happens after it’s washed for the tenth or fiftieth time. And that brings Cortbawi back to fabric.
For nearly a decade, Merlette has continued to use the cotton lawn it developed early in the brand’s life. Made from U.S.-grown Pima cotton and milled in India, it was developed to achieve a consistency Cortbawi couldn’t find in readily available alternatives.
Staying with it hasn’t always been the easiest commercial decision. When cotton prices rose sharply, cheaper options would have produced better margins. Merlette chose not to switch. Because customers notice.
They may not know the intricacies of the fibre or the mill, but they know how the dress feels. They know how it washes. And when they return years later, they know what they’re getting.
In an industry built around convincing us to want what’s next, there’s something quietly radical about making the same thing better. That philosophy extends to the handwork that has become another Merlette signature.
Many of the brand’s embroidered and hand-smocked details rely on techniques that are increasingly easy to imitate by machine. But Cortbawi sees a fundamental difference. Handwork can’t be rushed or exactly repeated. One garment may vary slightly from another. Each stitch contains a decision made by a person. Those variations aren’t defects to engineer away. They’re evidence of the making. They’re also connected to something larger.
The embroiderers Merlette works with depend on the continuity of that work, and maintaining those techniques means maintaining the people and skills behind them. Cortbawi describes collections with less hand-smocking prompting a straightforward question from the artisans: where’s the work?
It is a useful reminder that what something is made of includes who made it. The same pragmatism runs through the business itself. Merlette has grown independently, initially using wholesale orders and deposits to fund production rather than raising large amounts of outside capital. Today, direct-to-consumer represents a significant part of the business, supported by wholesale partners and the less romantic realities of longevity: cash flow, inventory, budgets and understanding what customers actually want.
Merlette isn’t interested in rejecting the modern fashion system simply for the sake of being different. It’s interested in deciding which parts are useful and which aren’t. The same is true of hype.
Certain Merlette pieces have gone viral. Cortbawi welcomes the new customers those moments bring, but she remains wary of confusing attention with longevity. “The faster something comes up,” she says, “the faster it comes down.” What lasts is harder to manufacture. It’s built through the customer who returns. The fabric that performs as expected. The artisan whose hand can be seen in a stitch. The dress someone has owned for years and still wants to wear.
Even Merlette’s approach to community follows that logic. For Cortbawi, community isn’t an Instagram following. It’s people the brand actually knows. In Tribeca and through residencies, private appointments and gatherings, that has meant customers learning something together, sharing a meal, trying on clothes with friends, meeting someone new, or simply spending time in the same room.
These experiences aren’t particularly scalable. That’s partly the point. Ten years into Merlette, Cortbawi’s original instinct feels increasingly prescient. As fashion confronts questions about quality, pricing, overproduction and the relentless demand for newness, perhaps the more interesting question isn’t what comes next. It’s what was there to begin with? The fibre. The hand. The fit. The person wearing it.
The things that endure are rarely defined only by what we notice first. They’re determined by what they’re made of.