J.J. Martin is speaking from her office in Milan, late at night, with the energy of someone who has just returned from an early-morning run. Behind her are two arched, mosaic-like illustrations, one lunar and one solar, drawn by her team from the polychrome marble inlay of Sicilian churches and printed on linen wallcovering. Overhead, Nekhbet, the Egyptian vulture goddess, is painted on the ceiling. The room occupies one of six floors in La DoubleJ‘s headquarters, a reimagined 1930s factory in the Navigli district that Martin naturally calls the Starquarters. Employees, she explains, are stars, never headcount.

Elsewhere are a subterranean archive, design studios, a showroom and, on the roof, the Galactic Deck. Its glass atrium houses the Gong Temple, where staff and members of La DoubleJ’s extended sisterhood take part in sound healing, meditation and yoga. Across central Milan, the Via Sant’Andrea flagship descends into the Divine Mother Cave, an underground grotta devoted to five manifestations of the sacred feminine, from Kali to Isis, complete with a rather unexpected bat installation. Martin calls her boutiques “raise-your-vibration stations”.

The New York Times recently crowned Martin “Fashion’s Woo-Woo Queen”, although the term hardly captures her fluency in both Italian manufacturing and metaphysical possibility. She can discuss a Sicilian church floor and a sacred geometry with equal conviction. More remarkably, she has built a successful business from the combination.

I first knew Martin in the late 1990s, when she was an ambitious American journalist with both feet planted in fashion’s terrestrial concerns. Raised in California and educated at Berkeley, she worked in advertising and at Calvin Klein before moving to Milan in 2001. There she wrote for international publications and became an attentive student of Italian style. It took years to recognise that she might be a creator herself.

The revelation followed a gruelling five-year struggle with infertility. Martin began working with an energy healer, hoping to become pregnant. Instead, she says, the process opened another creative channel and gave her vintage habit direction. “What was blocked for having babies was the same energetic channel for birthing any kind of creation,” she says.

La DoubleJ launched in 2015 as an online shop selling Martin’s vintage finds. Access to archives of exuberant Italian prints from the 1960s and ’70s led to original clothes made in those fabrics. The A-line Swing dress became an early signature, its generous surface suited to patterns never designed to pass unnoticed. Profitable within six months, the company remains owned by Martin and her former husband, Andrea Ciccoli, its co-chief executive.

What began online has expanded into ready-to-wear, homewares, jewellery, candles, physical stores and a community of 50,000 Sisterhood subscribers. Martin’s universe has grown broad enough to accommodate both the gong and the gravy boat.

Her second book, Table Energy: Entertaining with Italian Spirit, brings those strands together. Arranged around gatherings in Milan, Como, Venice, Portofino, Capri and Sicily, it is ostensibly an entertaining book, full of vivid tablescapes and La DoubleJ porcelain. Its real subject is the transformation of beauty from something observed into something experienced.

“It’s not just about copy-paste perfection,” Martin says. “It’s really about how you step into it rather than just being an observer watching it.”

Italy supplied the education. When Martin arrived in Milan, she could barely cook. Her first Thanksgiving involved days of preparation and a turkey too large for the oven. The bird caught fire in front of 10 guests; everyone joined the rescue effort, and the evening got better by going wrong. “I realised in that moment that you can’t take this so seriously,” she says.

That lesson was reinforced by Milanese women who could return from the office in a tailleur and produce pasta for five in half an hour. Their tables were considered but never strangled by the arrangements. Guests arrived late or brought friends without warning. The operative qualities were ease, tolerance and warmth.

Martin initially resisted the unannounced additions. Once she replaced irritation with curiosity about what the extra person might bring, she found they invariably brought plenty. “It’s about letting go of control,” she says.

Each location contributes a lesson. Milan taught her per bene sophistication, although Martin disrupts its rigorous order with Californian exuberance. Sicily demonstrated radical generosity: Italians may have big hearts, she says, but Sicilians have “galactic hearts”. At Passalacqua, on Lake Como, owner Valentina De Santis showed how exacting hospitality can still feel familial rather than transactional.

Capri provided perhaps her most influential teacher. For nearly a decade, Martin stayed with Susanne Thun, the former Vogue Italia stylist married to architect Matteo Thun. She observed olive oil and pinzimonio served on tiny dishes, the choreography of staff and the enlivening effect of Neapolitan singers. “She got the high end and the low end,” Martin says. The lessons found their way into La DoubleJ’s home collection.

Martin insists none of this requires a palazzo. A few bud vases, cork-backed placemats and dishwasher-safe plates can be enough. “It’s not about being grand, but it’s a respect for yourself and others,” she says. Customers lacking confidence can buy what she cheerfully calls “turnkey good taste”; those with a surer hand can break up the sets. A Swing dress should work with trainers by day or jewellery at a wedding; a cup can hold water, wine or flowers.

Physical retail was a later conversion. Martin once believed an online company did not need stores. The first, opened in 2021, disabused her. Each location now has its own energetic identity: an Eclipse Portal in Dallas, Chakra Portal in Palm Beach, Mediterranean Mandala in Capri and Galactic Garden within COMMUNITÉ Istanbul. The five-floor New York Lighthouse contains a printed entrance tunnel, a glowing Bohemian-glass chandelier, a towering Brazilian smoky quartz and another temple devoted to sound and light. A planned Los Angeles store was lost in the 2025 fires; Europe and the Middle East are next in her sights.

Hotels offer an even broader canvas. At Passalacqua on Lake Como, La DoubleJ designed the pool and bar areas down to the umbrellas, tableware and matchbooks. Villa San Michele above Florence has received three custom-designed spaces, including an Energy Chapel, an exclusive collection and year-round spiritual programming. The Dorchester’s Summer Garden in London became a temporary riot of fabrics and flowers. Hospitality is no longer simply something that happens around the products. It has become part of the product.

La DoubleJ has no outside investor, although Martin concedes that the right partner will eventually be needed. Most production remains with specialist Italian factories, including a principal supplier on Lake Como. She is pointed about the inflation practised by larger houses using the same factories. “It feels very manipulative and arrogant,” she says.

Her ambitions are hardly modest. A raise-your-vibration fragrance appeals, as does a broader store network. A new Sisterhood of Light capsule collection of dresses with Carolyn Murphy trades print for jacquard, brocade and embroidery; spacecraft-like candles extend the season’s preoccupation with illumination.

The vocabulary may induce an eye roll, something Martin understands. Yet the business has been propelled less by a conventional plan than by her enthusiasms: vintage clothes, forgotten prints, Italian artisans, hotel gardens, ancient symbols, communal tables and gong baths above Milan. “These were all deeply intuitive pulses,” she says. “They came from a place of knowing, but also excitement and joy.”

The table may be the clearest expression of that impulse. Martin can arrange every plate, flower and glass, but the evening only begins when people arrive, preferably with someone unexpected in tow. The control makes the beauty possible. Letting go gives it life.

Table Energy: Entertaining with Italian Spirit (The Vendome Press) is available in Australia on December 5.  For more entertaining and gift ideas, go to robbreport.com.au