About 10 seconds into my first conversation with Sat Hari, the co-founder of God’s True Cashmere, she stopped me. “If you’re okay with it, I just want to call in the light for myself and for you and just set an intention,” she said. “So, light for the highest good for this entire interview and how the world receives it and how it is perceived. My intention is to show up fully in my truth, in my loving, in my honesty, to bring forward whatever can serve for the highest good.”
Through the screen of a 13-inch MacBook Air, Sat Hari’s bare skin and golden goddess hair glowed. She has never dyed it in her fiftysomething years. Her voice—deeper and more grounded than I expected—radiated a combination of assurance, calm, honesty, and vulnerability as she explained her wildly unconventional path from a childhood spent at a girls boarding school in India (her mother was an American Sikh devoted to the controversial Kundalini guru Yogi Bhajan) to becoming a holistic healer in Hollywood and founder of the jewelry line Amrit to launching a collection of cashmere shirts with her friend and business partner Brad Pitt. Her vibe was powerful and convincing and remained so even as she revealed the catalyst for God’s True Cashmere, which launched in 2019 with a collection of button-down shirts (the buttons are healing gemstones aligned to the seven chakras of the body) that retail for up to $2,250 a pop.
“I had a dream on a Tuesday night, and it was about Brad,” Sat Hari said. “It was so clear. He was standing there telling me how he needed more green softness in his life. He needed more green cashmere.” When she relayed her vision to Pitt on Thursday, it turned out that he too had had a dream on Tuesday in which he asked his stylist for more softness in his life via green cashmere.
To show up fully in my truth, my original (admittedly skeptical) intention in calling up Sat Hari was to get to know a character manifesting of late everywhere in the worlds of luxury fashion and beauty. She is the latest incarnation of the Rich Witch, whose witchiness can be overt—Tom Brady called his ex-wife Gisele Bündchen a pregame altar-building witch in an interview in 2019—or more of a vibe. Pam Grossman, the host of the popular podcast The Witch Wave and author of Waking the Witch: Reflections on Women, Magic, and Power, defines a witch as “someone who is a carrier of divine feminine energy.” Witches can be of any gender. They believe that there is more to the world than meets the eye. “There’s a belief in spiritual forces,” Grossman says. “And this notion that we can engage with these forces to change ourselves and our lives and change the world.”
Historically, witch was an epithet used to persecute marginalized people. Tituba, an enslaved Caribbean woman, was one of the primary scapegoats in the Salem witch trials. Last year Nicola Sturgeon, then first minister of Scotland, issued a formal apology to the 4,000 people, mostly poor, vulnerable, or “different” women, accused of witchcraft between the 16th and 18th centuries. But there were rich witches, too.
Catherine Monvoisin was the wife of a 17th-century jeweler; she catered to a wealthy clientele with a suite of services ranging from fortune-telling to love potions. She was burned at the stake. A century ago Marchesa Luisa Casati served haute witch vibes along with a penchant for finery; she accessorized with live snakes. With the second wave feminism of the mid-20th century came a reclamation of the word witch as a term of pride and empowerment. In recent years conservative politics and its focus on dismantling women’s rights have summoned a new surge of witchery.
Today’s Rich Witch dwells in a Venn diagram of the wellness, spiritual, and New Age movements and the lifestyles of the one percent (hello, Gwyneth). She is a woman of immense privilege, or proximity to it, and her head and heart are in the metaphysical. Her face is slathered with organic, virgin, cold-pressed botanical oil; her body is cloaked in triple-ply cashmere or Italian silk bearing colorful, maximalist prints. Her philosophy, her clothes, her skincare, her tabletop—they’re all for sale, and none of it’s cheap. For she has looked within herself and outside herself and tapped into the magnificence of the universe to manifest…a luxury brand.
Her animating force is expansion, living a full and purposeful life. Grossman sees no problem with that, unless “it begins and ends with the self, because that’s when it’s about ego,” she says. “If wearing a magical luxury cashmere shirt is empowering to someone, I mean, fine. But I hope when they wear that shirt they actually do things that make the world better.”
Sat Hari and God’s True Cashmere are but one recent example of the commingling of the sacred and the capitalistic. After a long career as a fashion journalist, J.J. Martin, an American based in Milan, launched La DoubleJ in 2015 as an ode to her collection of Italian vintage prints. Her spiritual practice had started a year earlier, after a prolonged, painful struggle with infertility.
“I finally said, ‘I’m done with Western medicine. I’m done with the doctors, the pills, the hormones, the whole thing,’ ” Martin says. “I met my very first energy healer that day, and within a year I gave birth to my company.”
“Raise your vibration” is La DoubleJ’s tagline, and Martin doubled down on it during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic. With opportunities for traditional content limited, she started sharing the spiritual stuff and hosting online workshops with some of her favorite teachers. She had a gong, and she was not afraid to use it.
“This was not a marketing ploy. This was literally, ‘Hey, we don’t know what else to talk to you about. I know a lot about this, and maybe this could help you,’ ” Martin said. “It turned out that the same woman who wanted our dress was very interested in what kind of detoxes you can do in order to aid your sensitivity, your clairsentience, your clairvoyance, all of those kinds of things.”
Now, La DoubleJ’s website is not unlike Martin’s personal Goop scroll. A section titled “The Spirit Tickle” is a trove of content about the wisdom of Gaia, feminine and masculine energy, and starting ascension. The pieces are written by Martin and illustrated with photographs of her wearing the label in various scenes of enlightened fabulousness. There she is wearing La DoubleJ swimwear in Warrior 2 pose amid crashing waves. There she is in a matching La DoubleJ set, arms extended wide like Rio’s Christ the Redeemer on a La DoubleJ–hosted trip to Egypt guided by Dee Kennedy, a mystic high priestess. Elsewhere you can buy her Swing dress ($780) and Murano glasses (starting at $275 for two).
When Martin hosted a breakfast and breathwork session last summer at Isabella Rossellini’s Mama Farm in Brookhaven, Long Island, one of the attendees was Lia Chavez, a light artist who recently launched Hildegaard, a line of “haute botanical” face oils that “frame the skin as the site of exchange between the human and the wider cosmos.” On top of their botanical anti-inflammatory properties (and smelling good), the oils, which are named for the 11th-century mystic, writer, botanist, and healer Hildegard of Bingen (they retail for $295 to $495), promise some kind of transcendent experience.
“What we’re really trying to get at with Hildegaard and with this whole philosophical weaving is to assert that beauty is not a cosmetic covering, it’s the cosmic revelation of oneself,” said Chavez, who studied philosophy, feminism, and visual culture at Oxford and Goldsmiths’ College. Asked if Hildegaard is a commercial enterprise, she replied without missing a beat, “Very much so.”
Listening to Sat Hari, Martin, and Chavez talk about their moda operandi was to take in three very different energies. What they have in common is packaging their products in the pursuit of inner peace as they wax philosophical from a very cushy perch. Martin founded La DoubleJ with ex-husband Andrea Ciccoli, a former partner at Bain & Co. who started his own digital luxury fashion agency, the Level Group, which serves such clients as Dolce & Gabbana. Chavez is married to David Shing, aka “Shingy,” AOL’s longtime marketing director and self-styled “Digital Prophet,” a title that inspired a snarky profile in the New Yorker and a thinly veiled character on the sketch comedy series Mr. Show with Bob and David. Sat Hari’s business partner in God’s True Cashmere is Pitt, a man so famous he has levitated beyond pop and celebrity culture and perhaps even himself.
The cynic’s instinct is to question this cohort and their do-gooder intentions, which seem fundamentally at odds with shilling merch. To a large extent they are textbook examples of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. When one’s basic needs are met, what’s left at the top of the pyramid is self-actualization. And what’s wrong with that? Don’t we all want to self-actualize, heal, and commune with beauty? Grossman pointed out that witch culture is traditionally bathed in strong aesthetics: crystals, stones, incense, flowing gowns. Kate and Laura Mulleavy’s Rodarte fall-winter 2023–4 collection made a strong case for glamour witches.
Whatever Martin is channeling seems to be working. In February La DoubleJ announced that Maureen Chiquet, the former CEO of a little brand called Chanel, was joining as chair, charged with ramping up global growth. “DoubleJ, she’s our spirit baby,” Martin says. “She’s definitely one of the best things that came out of this entire experience, along with, I would say, overall tolerance for myself, because I thought I was going to blow my brains out.”
Sat Hari was in Paris during fashion week, hosting a showroom for God’s True Cashmere as it expands its retail footprint outside L.A.’s Just One Eye. Asked if she feels it’s important to educate people about her past as a healer, she said, “I don’t feel my history with healing is important, or my story even as a human. I think some people touch the shirts and they’re like, ‘It’s magic.’ ” In the showroom I tried on a blue shirt with stone buttons. It felt as if God—or Brad Pitt—was giving me a really good hug.
This story appears in the May 2023 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
