The Bella-Hadid Approved Brand Making Flirty Layered Dresses
I discovered Buci (pronounced boo-tsi, as its Instagram bio will tell you) the way most of its now-loyal fans have: through a video of a model wearing one of the New York–based brand’s dresses, picking up its thin fabric and tying it with a ribbon at the waist, gathering it around the body like the piped icing on a cake.
Not every piece founder Mishka Ivanovic designs can be transformed as easily, but the look has become one of her signatures. And it’s not hard to see why: It’s easily two dresses in one.
After wearing Buci’s popular Metis dress, I discovered it can also be effortlessly transformed into a top, if you just believe (or if you fold the fabric in half at the chest, and let the transparent material gather around your legs), and worn with a pair of baggy jeans. When I spot Ivanovic ahead of her off-calendar show, held in a town house on West 10th Street on Wednesday, two days before the official start of New York Fashion Week, she is almost surprised by the flexibility she’s designed. “I’ve never thought to wear it like that … we have to shoot it that way,” she tells me before I show her photos from hours earlier, in which I am wearing the dress the two other ways she has photographed before, fine-tuned to what felt right in the moment.
Like most young designers who seem to go viral overnight and are suddenly all over your feed, Ivanovic tells me she can’t believe how much and how quickly the fashion set in New York has embraced Buci. Even Bella Hadid has worn it. “Every single time someone tells me they love the brand or I see someone out on the street wearing it,” Ivanovic says, “I’m like, ‘How did they find us?’ ”
If not through Instagram or TikTok, then probably through a friend, I suggest. And she nods before remarking that her goal really is to design the kind of pieces that make you feel so beautiful, you have to tell someone else about them, in the hopes that it will make them feel great too.
As for dresses like the Metis—which has spread Buci’s name like wildfire by word of mouth through New York’s best dressed—she says, “If we’re making clothes and we’re making clothes that are new in a world where we don’t need any more clothes, I wanted the longevity of each garment that we produce to be as long as possible. We change as people, and our style changes, and our shape changes … ”
So, Ivanovic says, she thought: Is there a way to make a garment that can last through all these different periods of our lives? “And that we’re not sick of wearing, because we can wear it in so many different ways,” she adds. “And so I think it was just really about trying to bring the lifespan of each garment we’re putting out there as long as possible by making it more than one garment.”
Most of her garments are handmade in New York—a handful of pieces are produced in Portugal—because she is as inspired by the city itself as she is by its inhabitants who love her clothing. Ivanovic studied at Parsons and has lived here for six years. “I feel like I’ve been here long enough that the city’s now become part of my subconscious,” she says. “And most of these pieces in this [Spring 2025] collection, specifically, are things that I would want to wear in the city, and the kind of things that are for the city.”
They’re not extravagant, she says, but definitely “a little bit more out there, and things that I feel you could only really wear in a city like New York. I wanted to lean into things that are more fun! Like transparent ponchos and fluffy feathers and beaded chiffon and miniskirts … I feel really inspired by the freedom that New York gives us to be whoever we want.”
At this week’s show, placed on each chair is a fistful of rose petals in a paper cup, and a live band plays softly in the background as guests drink champagne out of coupe glasses. Everyone is gifted a transparent poncho to wear, and we are arranged so that our pastel shades create the illusion of an ombré rainbow. Models slink down the runway in lace minidresses, bejeweled two-pieces, and feathered tops. Some dance, others hold hands, and one fans herself with a comically large fan made of long black plumes.
After the show concludes, guests throw rose petals at the models, like one would at a wedding. Most runway shows could hardly be compared to a close friend’s nuptials, but Buci’s can. Instead of rushing out the door at the end, friends and editors alike embrace, a handful wearing the brand itself. Many stop to take photos of one another on plush vintage armchairs with transparent Buci fabric layered over them. There are whispers about what everyone will be buying—the collection is already available to shop—and words of encouragement from strangers who overhear.
And right as I leave, a person walks up to me and points at my Buci dress worn as a top, exclaiming, “I’m going to do that to mine!”
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