New York’s churches and art galleries begin readjusting back to their more humdrum daily life as New York fashion week comes to an end on Friday and the baton is hurled over to London. The biggest shows were marked by a sense of futuristic escapism and dominated by celebrities: Migos rapper Offset, the Hadid sisters and Rihanna – who had her own Savage X Fenty show – stole the majority of the headlines.

Yet there was one event that felt not just more old-fashioned, but positively pre-Raphaelite. Held in a diner in Tribeca, it showcased new pieces by Batsheva Hay, the New York fashion designer whose ankle-length, Orthodox Judaism-inspired prairie dresses have made her the unlikely hottest new name in US fashion.

Hay grew up in a secular Jewish family and married Alexei Hay, a fashion photographer who lives as a devout Orthodox Jew, in 2012. She worked as a corporate lawyer, but in 2016 her life changed when she needed to get an old Laura Ashley dress that she loved repaired. Inspired by the modern Orthodox women of New York who were increasingly in her life, as well as mother’s love of prairie dresses and what she describes as the “kinderwhore” aesthetic of Courtney Love, she decided to make some addendums to the dress: a higher neck, more corseted waist and sleeve ruffles. While she was there, she had a few other dresses remade in a similar pattern, using second-hand fabrics she’d bought on eBay. When she wore the dresses, she says she received tons of compliments and began making more to sell online.

Her frum fashion house quickly took off, counting Jessica Chastain, Natalie Portman, Amandla Stenberg and Erykah Badu among its famous fans. The New Yorker recently ran a profile on her, in which Hay gladly describes the dresses as “frumpy”. In the same piece Lena Dunham, another devotee, sums up why they are so popular: “They really look like the party dresses that you would’ve wanted when you were six, or like the dresses that characters in your favorite book would have worn.”

This week’s diner show was Batsheva’s first time exhibiting at one of the major fashion weeks, although there was not a catwalk in sight. Instead models ate food and drank milkshakes, while journalists and guests were invited to do the same. The show was well received although occasionally damned with faint praise: the influential fashion journal Women’s Wear Daily said there was something “strangely compelling about Hay’s audacious treatment of a look that should have no place in modern society”.

The highest flattery, one might argue, has been imitation. Recent shows by Coach, Erdem and other big-name brands have started to draw on the Amish prairie orthodox look. She’s also a finalist for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, perhaps the most influential prize for new designers. Not content with ruffling sleeves, Batsheva Hay seems to be ruffling feathers in the fashion industry too.