Salon Style: Houston Gets a Private Look at UNA Lab

Elizabeth Carl, Kirby Edmonds and Anne Carl (photo by Michael Monreal)

By Jeff Gremillion

UNA Lab left New York long enough to set up shop in Anne Carl’s living room.

Founder and designer Erica Crisses brought her made-in-New York collection to Houston on Sept. 16 for a private trunk show at Carl’s beautiful home, where Carl’s friends and her daughter, Elizabeth Carl, spent the afternoon trying on pieces and talking through the clothes with the designer herself. 

The salon-style setup skipped the usual retail rush. Bubbly-sipping guests could handle the fabrics, test a silhouette and ask Crisses how she meant each piece to move through a wardrobe.The label is built on clean lines, careful proportions and fabrics meant to last more than one season, from quiet everyday knits and lightweight layers to dresses, tailored separates and matching sets that can be worn together or split apart. 

Crisses’ mother knitted, sewed and tailored her own clothes, and the designer still works from the same rule: buy less, choose well, wear often. After years in luxury retail and buying, she launched UNA Lab — Latin for “one” and “only” — to make the polished, interchangeable pieces she says she could not find elsewhere.

The collection is available at una-lab.com.

Susan Plank and Anne Carl (photo by Michael Monreal)

Erica Crisses (photo by Michael Monreal)

Anna Mair and Emma Carruth (photo by Michael Monreal)