“I’m a cuddlebug. I can be into things that are very uncool.”

“Welcome.” Maryam Nassirzadeh bestows her greeting upon me in a conspiratorially low voice. Although we are not in her Lower East Side mecca of a store, but in a mostly empty and softly lit Italian café near her home in New York’s NoHo neighborhood, it’s clear that Nassirzadeh is accustomed to making everywhere she goes into her own domain. Seated at the dining room’s first marble table, illuminated by the glow of the café’s cheese counter, this popularly anointed oracle of downtown fashion is dressed for morning tea in an eloquent assembly of unlikely elements. She wears a Charvet button-down in thin blue pinstripes and a rainslicker-shiny patent skirt from her own line, paired with Margiela’s iconically weird split-toe Tabi boots. Her broad eyebrows and long flaps of d...