This New York-Based Designer Wants to Revive the Tradition of American Couture

As cliché as it may sound, Erik Barshai didn’t choose fashion design — fashion design chose him.

“I was born with this intense desire to do it,” he tells Fashionista. “In fact, there was never a moment of [wanting] any other job from the moment I could form a conscious thought.”

Thus, Barshai’s career path was pretty straightforward: He graduated from Pratt Institute in 2017, followed by design stints at Jill Stuart, Bode, Alice + Olivia and Aliette. Then, things took a turn, or rather, a halt. Barshai became a victim of burnout.

“I was looking in the mirror and felt like I couldn’t do this anymore,” he reflects. “I was feeling really burnt out and like I had lost the dream.” So he ventured onto his own, in hopes of finding that spark again. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to give this one more chance… not following anything I’ve been instilled since joining the industry, [but rather] trying to get back into myself,” he adds.

In 2020, his label Barshai was born. But his love for fashion was still diminished. His industry experiences, he says, provided an “important reality check” and “perspective” on understanding the womenswear market, but they had also stripped the fashion fantasy away with the prioritization of speed and quantity over quality. Reconnecting with that dream took time — a turning point came at Barshai’s Resort 2025 show in June.

“There is this one moment I as a designer yearn for, and it’s when you see all the women in the lineup right before they walk,” he says. “That’s the dream. It’s so utterly seductive for the individual, and for you as the designer, because you spent all this time [preparing] and for just this one moment, very briefly, the universe looks just like how you imagined it. That feeling was the thing I had missed. Once I experienced that again, I remembered how much I love this industry.”

Titled “House of Barshai,” the show was a formidable introduction for the brand, as it highlighted the designer’s talent for craftsmanship and thorough attention to detail. The brand’s following Spring 2025 show — which Barshai and his team put together in six weeks — during New York Fashion Week continued exploring this thread, further revealing where Barshai’s heart truly lies: American couture.

He’s always had a fascination with the craft, as historically, couture isn’t about being the most “flashy” or “intricate” — as he puts it, the “quality is in the cut” and the “tiniest of details can make something feel so valuable.” To him, that way of thinking is at the core of Barshai.

“It is my hope that when people look at the work, they see the hours of time that went into the little details,” he says. “This also feels like I’m continuing the legacy, and [honoring] people like Norman Norell, Bill Blass or Charles James, these great designers who’ve been forgotten by time…It’s too early for me to say I have a place in that canon, but I’m trying to interact with it as purely as I can from an artistic perspective.”

While claiming his space within American fashion, Barshai also wants to use his artistry to embrace body inclusivity, which, he emphasizes, naturally aligns with the couture approach.

“If the methodology is about fitting to individual women and creating various styles that follow different bodies…. my hope is that this brand can grow to include as many different kinds of women who want to wear it as possible,” he explains.

As such, Barshai’s current business model is solely custom and made-to-order. This was a strategic decision: “The best part of this process is getting to know the client. We’re not made symmetrically. Every part of our body is a little different. The feeling you get as a consumer when you know that something has been made perfectly to your body — lumps, bumps, warts and all — is truly, I think, the closest fashion can get to something spiritual because it’s just a completely different world.”

That said, the label plans to expand into ready-to-wear and wholesale partnerships are in discussion. Retail pricing is still to be decided, but estimates for some pieces are as high as $5,000. Barshai recognizes this puts him out of the budgets of many consumers, but to sacrifice “substance over mass” would take away from the “purity of quality” and “ethos of couture,” he feels.

“One day in the future, it would be great to sell something [of mine] that I could actually buy,” he laughs. “But at the same time, I’m still young enough that I don’t want to compromise the design and give the customer something less just so that it can be more accessible.”

Creative process-wise, Barshai takes a “very labored” approach. It starts with a “fleeting thought” about a shape or concept that “haunts” him. He then sketches various iterations of this idea, followed by securing fabric and draping it on the form with many attentive edits, until he lands on the final vision.

“By the time I’ve gotten the fabric and draped it on the form to see what it would look like, it’s nothing [like] the original concept because the fabric dictates so much of what the final garment will be,” he explains. “But in that moment, before I put my hand on the fabric, it could be anything. And that’s always very exciting.”

Everything is produced in-house in the brand’s Lower East Side studio, by Barshai and his “small and very close team of collaborators.” Fabric sourcing is also done domestically, though he’d eventually “love to work with mills to create fabric” and design prints.

As Barshai looks towards the future, every step he takes today is to ensure his business will still be around “10 years down the road,” which, “in this economy feels like the most unlikely dream.” Ideally, the brand will offer custom and ready-to-wear, as both “can exist within the same business as long as they are designed with intentionality,” he says.

Another career goal for Barshai? To design for another house.

“That is such an exciting prospect because with another person’s brand, you can go in and view abstractly this identity of a thing, and it becomes codes or rules. That to me is the best space for creativity — when there are rules, you get to break the rules. You get to work within someone else’s aesthetic and find that marriage between modernity and the past. And that’s my ethos.”

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Source: Fashionista.com