Boxing Kitten’s Designer Maya Lake: Re-Defining Afro-Chic

“I love Josephine because she was this really complex, multi-layered woman,” she said. “She was a dancer, she was a singer, she was an actress, she was an activist, and she was just way ahead of her time. And that’s really what I think the clothes are about, it’s about mixing all of these different things. No one woman is one dimensional.”

Baker’s feminine fashion sensibilities are clearly evident in Lake’s productions. “A lot of my pieces are burlesque-inspired. They are very bedroom, very boudoir, with a lot of corseting and boning and bra tops.”

With Lake making such a name for herself, does she worry about copycats? Certainly not. “There’s no copy-writing in fashion. You change one stitch and it’s yours as long as you’re not putting someone else’s label on it,” she said. “So I think the only thing I can do is keep moving forward, keep doing what I’m doing, because no one’s going to do it the way I’m doing it.”

Check out more looks from Boxing Kitten’s Resort Collection: