Launched in 2010, Ace & Jig is premised on the yarn-dyed fabrics that Cary Vaughan and Jenna Wilson weave at an old-school factory in India, all of which feature some version of a stripe. That may sound tiresome and even possibly eye-numbing, but the designers manage to conjure a lot of variety from their yarn-dyeing technique. This season, for instance, riffing on both the motley colors of carousels and the semi-blurred vision you get spinning around on one, they offered patterns of graphic squares and checkerboard, plus a whole plethora of plaids. The signature Ace & Jig material, meanwhile, is a supple gauze cotton— sometimes barely-there, sometimes woven doubly on the loom—that well serves the brand's super-easygoing silhouettes. Much as Vaughan and Wilson keep a firm control of their collections' stripey-ness, so too do they keep their shapes just shy of schlumpy; the look is untailored, but the individual pieces are nicely finessed in their construction. To wit, this season's darted button-down or the snug but slouchy cropped pant. That said, a bit more specificity to the shapes would not go amiss here. Only a bit, though—a large part of the Ace & Jig charm is its air of naïveté, a sort of gamine-gone-boho thing that comes off as unique.
