Cortana

Cortana was founded in 2001 by Rosa Esteva, who trained in fine arts and design in Barcelona and has built the house across twenty-five years without a campaign. Production has stayed close to home: small workshops in Barcelona and Mallorca, cloth from French and Italian mills.

The house is Mallorcan in origin and Barcelona in address. Rosa Esteva grew up on the island and went to Barcelona at eighteen to study fine arts and design, and Cortana carries her grandmother’s name. The first store was in Palma, and the workshops that make the collection are still divided between the two places. The island is not a decorative fact about the label. It is where the colours come from: Marés, the colourway of the Costa trouser, is the sandstone quarried on Mallorca and the stone Palma is built from.

The material list is the design philosophy. Silk, linen, ramie, cashmere, cotton, fine wool, and cupro, in ivory and bone and stone, cut so that the cloth does the work. There is very little construction in a Cortana garment and almost no hardware. The Tunez pants are entirely silk and flow rather than stand. The Costa pants are entirely linen, high-rise and tapered, with the weave left visible as texture. The Nora cardigan is linen. The Theresa shirt is a striped blend of linen, viscose, silk, and a single percent of virgin wool. This is a house that would rather solve a problem in the weave than in the seam. Esteva’s own watercolors become the prints, which is not a marketing story so much as an explanation of why the colors sit where they do.

We began carrying Cortana in May of 2026 and wrote about why at the time, in Cortana, Now at W Department. The short version is that we are its first and only physical stockist in the interior Mountain West, and that the light here does something to bone and stone and ivory that a photograph on a screen will not tell you.

Cortana at W Department

The SS26 buy is women’s throughout: the Elena, Irina, and Mayu dresses, the Aria skirt, the Anele and UFO tops, the Theresa shirt, the Nora cardigan, the Costa, Mel, and Tunez pants, and the Sack bag in two sizes.

It is a first season and it is deliberately narrow. We would rather learn a house properly than stock it broadly.

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Continue Exploring

• All Cortana. The SS26 buy in full.
• Cortana, Now at W Department. Written when the first season landed in May of 2026.
• Dresses. Every dress we carry.
• Tibi. Amy Smilovic’s American house, carried for clean lines and quiet tailoring.
• Visit W Department. 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza, open daily, 11 to 5.

Shop Cortana