Ida+Moon Takes Us on a Stylish Desert Road Trip for Denver Fashion Week

If you try to picture a free-spirited, boho, rock-and-roll girl from the West, an image of Hannah Marie might come to mind. Draped in a flowy white lace prairie dress, sheepskin vest, bolero hat, turquoise jewelry and cowboy boots, the designer for Ida+Moon embodies the style she creates for others.

That may be because she doesn't follow fashion trends or traditional sewing and textile-dyeing rules. She designs for herself and hopes others will like it. And they are taking notice. With more than 20,000 followers on Instagram and an invitation to show at Denver Fashion Week on Sunday, May 7, she's attracted devotees of her brand who like what they see and want to get the look, too.

Marie got her start making gemstone necklaces and giving them to friends.

"I would give them to people on their birthday, and then everyone wanted one, so I kept making them," she recalls. A friend working in a boutique suggested she put the jewelry in their store, and Marie came up with a brand name and pricing. She says the name Ida+Moon came from two symbols she's drawn to: Ida, the goddess of the earth, and the moon cycles.

"I like nature and natural things. When I picked the name, I didn't know where it would go. It works because it isn't limiting in any way," she explains.
Marie grew up in Southern California, but her parents were from Colorado, and they often traveled back and forth to visit extended family. She feels the road trips through the desert had a huge effect on her: "I remember looking out the window at the beautiful desert color palette."

Her dad moved the family to Alabama for work when Marie was in her teens, and the road trips back to Colorado further showed her the culture of the Southwest, bringing more influences to her fashion choices.

She says her love of fashion came from playing dress-up as a child. "My mom got me this big trunk and filled it with vintage clothes for me to play with. I would do that for hours," she recalls. "I just loved putting outfits together!" 

After high school, she took jobs as a salesperson at Anthropologie and Free People and eventually moved up to styling for the stores' fashion shows. At age 25, she decided to move to Colorado for good. She got a transfer from her job and started doing personal styling as well as styling for photo shoots and fashion shows in Denver.

And eventually, she went from creating jewelry to designing leather bags. "I had this bag in mind I wanted to make, so I taught myself how to make it," says Marie. "I gave it to a friend to test it out, and everyone liked it."

As with the jewelry, she was asked to make more, so she rebooted the Ida+Moon brand in the hope of selling her new bags. In 2019, she quit her job to focus on her brand. She'd been collecting vintage clothes and decided to resell them with a new jewelry line she made with horsehair and beads; she then elevated the collection to revive old clothes with natural dyes.

"I would find these vintage dresses and tops, and they were so beautiful. But they had stains on them, and nobody wanted them. I didn't want to just leave them," Marie recalls. She started experimenting with dyes and found she could salvage the vintage pieces. "It totally transforms the look. It's a completely different piece once it's dyed," she says.

Marie says learning to work with natural dyes was a creative project that started during the pandemic shutdowns in 2020: "It was such a weird time. It gave me a fun, new thing to do and learn how to save these clothes."

She admits her process for dying textiles is trial and error, but that's what makes it interesting for her. "If you read about natural dyeing online, a lot of chemistry is involved," she notes. "That feels really tedious and takes the fun out of it for me. I just like to try different things and see what comes out."
Another tedious aspect of working with vintage clothing is that it's only in the size you find it in, which is often small. "I'd love to re-create those pieces I've found over the years and make them in more sizing options so everyone can enjoy them," Marie says.

While combining vintage clothes with her leather bags, Marie's boho-desert-girl style began to emerge for her brand. The muted, earthy color palette she uses in her botanical dyes complements the look. It also lends an environmentally friendly factor, which is one of the reasons she's showing during the sustainability night at Denver Fashion Week.

Lately, Marie has been working more with leather and sheepskin to make fluffy vests, jackets, bags and collars. "Sheepskin is so comforting, and it's so fun to make. I can't stop working with it!" she says, though some might say that working with animal hides isn't exactly earth-friendly. Marie is well aware of the controversy, and offers an alternative view: "People say leather isn't sustainable and want you to use vegan leather. But that's really not sustainable. It's made of plastic. It falls apart and breaks and ends up in the landfill. I source old hides and save them from being thrown out, or naturally tanned leather, which is chemical-free. That's really important to me."

Her current sheepskin line, she says, comes mainly from old rugs she washes and cuts apart to make into bags and vests. Since most of her leather products are made from scraps, she can only do small batches, but she's okay with that. "They're more special when only a few of them are available," Marie says.
Marie always wanted to create her own clothing line. She just needed to figure out how to do it. She doesn't own a sewing machine; she currently hand-sews each item and plans to keep it that way.

"People tell me I could make so much more if I make them on a machine, but I'm not really interested in that," she says. "There's something really special about a handmade piece of clothing or bags. There are a lot of little special details."

For her Denver Fashion Week debut, she's planning to have a mix of all the items that make up her brand: vintage clothing, leather bags, sheepskin vests and a few new nightdresses made from salvaged cotton for easy summery looks.

Marie was invited to participate by the show's promoters, who were impressed with her Instagram. But considering it's her first show, she confesses the task is a bit daunting: "They told me I needed to have twelve to fifteen models, and I was a little overwhelmed. But I just told myself, 'I can do this!'"

There's also a bit of a rock-and-roll edge in Marie's styling. That influence started in high school with her love of classic-rock bands such as Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles. "I was inspired by the clothes they wore, the textures and the combinations they put together," she says.

The current Amazon series about a fictional rock band in the 1970s, Daisy Jones and the Six, is also serving as a model for her show at Denver Fashion Week. "It really revived my love of rock-and-roll clothes. So my collection will have a vibe of effortless, bohemian, 1970s California," says Marie.

While her clothes may draw from vintage eras, the goal is to be classic and have longevity. "What's great about Western wear is it never goes out of style," she says. "You can wear it in any season and with any trend."

Marie says she's not a fan of following trends in fashion, mainly because it's not sustainable: "Trends are about always buying something new and throwing out the old. My brand is about timeless pieces you can wear forever."

Ida+Moon will be at Denver Fashion Week Day 2 Sustainable, 5 to 9 p.m. Sunday, May 7, at The Brighton - A Non Plus Ultra Venue, 3403 Brighton Boulevard. Find tickets at denverfashionweek.com.