They've dressed first ladies, Academy Award-winning actresses and supermodels.

Now they're designing casual luxury that they believe appeals to women all over the world.

Marie and Kelly Gray, the mother-daughter duo and former head designer and chief executive officer, respectively, behind luxury house St. John, opened a new chapter with the debut of their apparel company Grayse two years ago.

Grayse, a ready-to-wear line retailing from $195 to $1,250, hit racks at select Bloomingdale's — including the Fashion Island location — Saks Fifth Avenues and boutiques in Palm Desert and Canoga Park.

The most recent expansion was introduced this month — a pop-up shop, also at Fashion Island. It will be there through February 2016.

"We're very excited," Kelly said as she sat in the newly designed boutique, next to Traditional Jewelers, near Bloomingdale's. "My mom's taste for luxury is the benchmark for the brand."

That penchant for design came together in 1962, when Marie and her husband, Robert, founded the St. John clothing line, which is headquartered in Irvine.

The couture with a core of signature knits remains the same today with its decorative touches like beads, crystals and buttons that are gilded with 24-karat and hand-sewn during the finishing process.

But after 43 years of designing and crafting the simple yet elegant knit dress, the Grays left St. John in 2005 when the company was purchased by a private equity firm. Eight years later, in 2013, the two women were back in business together with their new Grayse label.

"My mom was playing golf and she hurt her knee, and during that time, she came into my office and had ideas for a new line," Kelly said. "We decided to put a little collection together and started with 15 pieces, and now it's ballooned into this."

The new label of casual, versatile separates and dresses is a modern collection of Italian silk-printed tunics, leather jackets and embellished tops and dresses.

Most of the collection is produced at the company's headquarters in Irvine.

Kelly and Marie, who do the designing for Grayse, said they have an appreciation for working together.

"It's so much easier as adults," Kelly said with a laugh. "It's amazing and it's a privilege. We're both excited about our foray back into retail. I can be more conservative, and mom tends to push the boundaries."

The designers have recognized the difference in style between the Palm Desert and Orange County shopper.

Women in the desert getaway prefer a polished look and tend to dress up more, while the Orange County woman's style is edgy and relaxed and she is always looking for new and contemporary shapes.

Fashions have evolved, Kelly said, noting that after 2008, as the country was reeling from the Great Recession, consumers reevaluated how much they spent on clothing.

"Today, people have an appreciation for a relaxed style and easier price point," she said. "Grayse is more whimsical. It's a brand you're purchasing for Thursday, not weeks in advance. It's buy now, wear now."

Reconstructing the interior of the building housing the pop-up was challenging, Kelly noted, adding that friend Tom Penna, president of ITX Construction, helped get the boutique set up months before the holidays.

On opening night at the Fashion Island pop-up shop, the boutique's newly installed chandelier glistened and mannequins were clad in holiday gowns tailored with shimmery pave embellishments.

"This dress is so comfortable and doesn't wrinkle," Kelly said as she showcased a black and gold pave-encrusted floor-length dress. "It's exciting to make every woman of every shape feel beautiful."

read more:www.marieaustralia.com/long-formal-dresses

www.marieaustralia.com/formal-dresses-sydney

παλαιoς Σαμουήλ αλληλουχία - alter.: palaios samou(ee)l - yes the acute diacritic on the eta doubles it to prolong it - allilouchia - Mr. Xavier had an itch, or an itx in Me'h cha cha cha chinos - jaded, round we go around the Babylonian tower of gobble gob blah and babble - as in: for some reason i thought η (eta) was about resembling an acute version of ε (epsilon), apparently that isn't the case, people never tell you! what with Greeks applying diacritical marks (never expected that to happen), to the pseudo-Romans not applying such distinctions - or was that much ado about marching decisions in the having of things? but fair enough, stressing η with ή does get the e out from the prescribed i - some would say people have been dragged into this necessary realm of explanation on the diacritical basis, rather than into linguistic hieroglyphics of what the study of linguistics has decided to do, namely?
                          arithmetic (/əˈrɪθmətɪk/)

                                                                       was it easier
to turn the a and make it equal to e in notation as ə than
it was to add a diacritical mark? this is British linguistic notation
(by the way); was it? sometimes it feels like learning to count
a minute saying: one, two, three, four... sixty!
what am i aiming at? well... let's just call it Project Ukraine,
i.e. the fertile basin of the eastern plateaus of Europe -
this is revised understanding of Plato, who originally dealt
with numbers in the following way:
                a. 1 + 1 = 2 is a proposition of arithmetic
  b. 'i have ten fingers' is a an empirical proposition of enumeration
already we have it: well, obviously... where are the numbers
suggesting i have hands, that there are two, and that there
are 10 digits on them? according to a. i would have to simply
  write 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - that's the proposition of
arithmetic for b. - meaning the language is to strident in
empiricism... but never mind that... what i am proposing is
a proposition of grammar - using the missing diacritical marks
on the English phonetic encoding, the existence of diacritical
marks on other European strains of the Latin alphabet,
and the fact that by omitting diacritical stresses the linguistic
alphabet emerged - as already stated but to reiterate:

          enumerate ([ih-noo-muh-rey-shuh n, ih-nyoo-])

this being the American version of encoding, kinda looks
like ol' McDonald had a farm, e ah e ah e ah oh - again
the number (/ˈnʌmbə/) of things could be said why diacritical
stresses were not added, or not taught properly to make way
for this engraving of specialised understanding,
everyone, whether pauper, pillar of society, saint or sinner,
poet, ballet dancer or street cleaners understands 1, 2, 3,
better than he understands thumb, index or ******* -
but shove someone the encoding /ˈnʌmbə/ and they'll be
like... huh?! no one gets the joke of the up-side down nu (ν)
as representing in American linguistics: n'ah and then mm -
bear, or however they spaghetti tangle that with their
Texan drawl; meaning? oddly enough the linguistic alphabet
in Platonic terms is actually the opposite of what Plato ascribed
his knowledge of numbers to... meaning when looking at
the linguistic alphabet i'm prone to the knowledge of an
empirical proposition of "enumeration" b. (coin it what you like,
basically involving letters rather than numbers), rather than
the proposition of arithmetic (i.e. spelling) a..

________________

you know what the problem is?
all this omnipresent omnipotent omni-relevant
but actually irrelevant considerations of god lead to?
your self, God found a cure at the Edict of Worms -
we need no celestial c.c.t.v., we need good
and bad, we need chemistry experiments too -
stop being a ***** and live with it,
whatever bad came, whatever good came,
live with the two, you can't turn to some
celestial dictator to cut short peoples lives
and curb the freedom of choice -
it's simple, there are only two... that's Welsh
for ******* - i'm sensible in my belief to feed
him the benefit of denial (only gods can be
given the benefit of denial, 21st century humanity
exposes the need, we live in the kindergarten
times of politics, outright denial, no benefit of
the doubt - i preferred the old ways of
doubt providing good faith as a wavering,
a flag on a pole and a finicky wind stirring it
either side of the flutter - outright denial is
a cheap way out - it completely obliterates any chance
inspection) - so why is this God of all so irrelevant?
your self included, i guess it's partly because he's
a supreme advocate of solipsism -
that grounds him, ah crab, too much verbiage,
i was hoping to keep this old samuel sequence short
and sweet, original intentions turned into this,
Ezra Pound wrote thirty lines and came back
with a haiku's minimalism, Frank O'Hara rambled
on and celebrated the fact that he was a pure narrator,
no character study with that poem of his
why i'm not a painter: one day i'm thinking of
a colour... i write a line... pretty soon it is a whole
page of words (not lines)... then another page...
depends whether you want to drink a beer
or drink absinthe... this poem? in its original intention?
why with all that omnipresence and omnipotence
laid before the altar of presupposed, supposed
or experienced call for existence, he merely chose
solipsism. yep, that's all there was, an argument
by God against the gifts of making him omni-whatever
was argued down: get on with it, i don't want slaves,
your politics is not my politics - however much
you fortune cookie your way into how things work,
solipsism is the way out... and that's why poets
don't invent characters to study with the necessary
voyeurism - like with philosophers, it's god -
and that sorta dilutes everything, to write about god
is to rebel against writing about characters, real or
not, it's to keep a pristine narrative - the debate
about verifying a proof of with miracle is done
in room 102 - not here... i'm talking about
writing, not changing nappies and curing cancer
with a touch of the hand... i mean how language is
organised in the form it expresses.