In minor, lighthearted, low-stakes news, the full Johanna Ortiz collection dropped at H&M today and I'm going to review it. I felt a little torn about this because for the last few years I've been moving away from buying from any fast fashion brands and otherwise would try to only buy H&M secondhand. On the other hand, I'm a long time Johanna Ortiz fan (my first JO dress) and want to support her collection to help it be a commercial success. If you don't know her, Johanna Ortiz is a Colombian designer (read a profile here) whose clothes I always think of as colorful, flirty and expensive. I feel like 3 years ago I remember her dresses retailing for around $1,000 (still too expensive for me but I bought secondhand or otherwise heavily reduced - they often appear on TheRealReal.com) but recently I've been seeing them retailing for closer to $1,500-$2,500. In this collab, nothing that I saw is over $70.
I was curious to see what she would do with H&M and what the quality of the pieces would be. Obviously, the fabrics are going to be different from what is in her normal collections. As a petite lady I also always appreciated that her sizing ran a little smaller and was curious if that would carry through in the collection. My thoughts are woven throughout below, but my overall impression was positive. I think there are a few items where fit was sort of strange (on me at least - and I'll point it out below) but that otherwise I thought it was a cute and well-done collection for the price. Most of the dresses had pockets, a few were lined and a lot of them had cute details like semi-open backs or covered buttons.
This is what I tried on:
