Whether or not they plan a formal runway show, these under-the-radar talents bear watching. Some create their own fabrics, others work magic with knitting yarns, and still others combine street style and high style in strikingly inventive ways. Here, our picks for the season.

Prints That Tell a Story

“We’re a little drawn to spirits,” Julie Haus was saying the other day. And to their eerie haunts as well. During a recent visit to the Catskills, with her husband and design partner, Jason Alkire, she discovered the moldering remains of a once majestic hotel on Overlook Mountain, near Woodstock, N.Y. “I thought, ‘Wow, if you squinted, you could probably see the ghosts in the wall.’ ”

There were no ghosts. But she and Mr. Alkire, her partner in Haus Alkire, an artist and photographer, captured the gray ruin on film, interpreting its moss-covered walls and surroundings in a series of prints rendered layer-over-layer on cotton velvet, four-ply silk and organza. For fall, the ethereal patterns will also include eerie tree limbs, fox fur and the like.

The designers, the winners this month of the Fashion Group International rising star award, are natural-born storytellers. “It’s almost like we’re writing a script,” said Mr. Alkire, who usually dreams up the patterns that find their way into Ms. Haus’s deceptively simple designs: high-waist trousers, loosefitting boat-neck tanks and A-line skirts, some influenced, she said, by her design idols, Dries Van Noten and Marni among them, and detailed with athletic netting, decorative threads and other bits of whimsy.