Postcards from the Edge — Anaak Resort 2018

The Salton Sea, the eerily desolate and slowly dwindling saline lake on a stretch of desiccated land in California’s far southeastern Sonoran Desert, was, in fact, an accident. Created in the early 1900s when the Colorado River began to overflow into the desert basin, the water would continue for two years until massive loads of boulders were hauled in to halt its path, but, by then, this accidental sea had already grown to 400 square miles. In the years that followed, the Salton Sea, the so-called “miracle in the desert,” would become a fertile fishery, a tourist playground, and, by the end of the 1970s, because of its oppressive and disintegrating ecosystem, a cautionary tale of what happens when humans intercept nature’s path as it began to transform into the unearthly, post-apocalyptic landscape that remains today.

Viewed from a distance the Salton Sea looks serene—a vast darkened pool with shimmering crests of indigo all of it skirted by mounds of powdery white. A thing of beauty suspended in time like a postcard. But as you approach, cracks in the façade become apparent—the water is shallow and rusty-hued, the sand isn’t sand at all, but piles of rocks and fish bones—and a different and far stranger brand of beauty emerges: a beautiful decay. On Bombay Beach, you can still find vestiges of its storied past, when, in the 1950s and 1960s, hotels and yacht clubs beckoned tourists and celebrities like Sonny Bono, Frank Sinatra, and The Beach Boys, to visit the idyllic “Salton Riviera.” Now the gutted-out structures, faded signs, and empty, kidney-shaped pools are scattered across a dusty and desolate terrain with a pock-marked appearance akin to the surface of the moon.

Amidst the ruin, the Anaak 2018 Resort collection rises like a siren from this inadvertent sea, a singular beauty, as dark and poetic, as its Salton backdrop. Anaak’s signature sensibility—relaxed, perpetually wearable silhouettes with a raw earthiness reflective and synergistic with the natural environment—remains, injected now with a slightly more overt femininity and crisp, sculptural details. There is a long dress in hand-woven sheer cotton gauze that drapes languidly with smocked cinching at the waist and a supremely easy matching short set in buttery soft, double cotton “cheesecloth;” a voluminous micro gingham check tunic with a high neckline and broad, ruffled sleeves, and a free-form dress in rich, wild silk tussar with diagonal ruffle details and slender straps. All of it rendered in a full spectrum of earthen hues from brown umber, burnt sienna, and ocean blue, to palest mint, blushy pink mist, and a pearly off-white that mirrors a shell’s interior. A sartorial love letter.