The feline/fashion alliance gets deeper this week with a new line of women's wear out of New York. Maya A Lake named her label after a super-powered cat that came to her in a dream, a fighter kitty with knitted boxing gloves who serves as muse, mascot and all around style sparring partner. Boxing Kitten is officially two seasons old, although Lake's design training goes back way further—the New York native picked up dress-making smarts from her mother and studied the sartorial habits of women of the Civil Rights Movement at Wesleyan University. She references both conservative cuts of that era and the bolder fashions of the Black Power movement in her fall 2009 collection. Coca-Cola bottle va va voom is shot with feminine restraint, then filtered through a printed West African kaleidoscope, a look she's christened "ethnic rockabilly."
