Clothing
Clothing
BIRROT
Birrot sits between Copenhagen and Seoul and refuses to pick a side. Kyeongmin Kim and Seyoung Hong met in London, moved to Denmark and founded the label there in 2018, naming it after the Korean word for originating from. The clothes are Scandinavian in restraint and Korean in precision
DARKPARK
Darkpark exists because Inna Gerchikov could not find a pair of jeans she wanted to wear. She spent fifteen years importing Californian denim into Italy, then founded the label in Milan in 2021 with Maurizio Purificato, the Antonia co-founder behind Khrisjoy. It is luxury denim made in the Veneto and worked to precision
Harris Tapper
Harris Tapper started with a conversation in the back of a taxi about the perfect shirt. Sarah Harris Gould and Lauren Tapper met working on a retail launch in Auckland, noticed there was nothing between fast fashion and full luxury for women who needed to be taken seriously at work, and founded the label in 2017. It's a work of art for the modern day working woman
Colleen Allen
Colleen Allen trained in menswear, worked under Raf Simons at Calvin Klein and designed at The Row, then launched her own womenswear label in February 2024. Within two years she had a CFDA nomination, an LVMH Prize finalist spot and a front row that included Charli XCX and Greta Lee. The clothes are tailored with menswear rigour and cut with something much stranger in mind.
Ay Que Calor
Ay Que Calor is a Colombian resortwear label designed by Maygel Coronel, who was born in Cartagena in 1987 and studied fashion in Bogotá, Cartagena and at the Accademia della Moda in Naples. It sits alongside her eponymous label and the pieces are handmade locally in Colombia.
Conner Ives
Conner Ives is the American designer who moved from Bedford, New York to London in 2014, studied at Central Saint Martins, and turned his graduate line into an independent label in 2021, the same year he was named an LVMH Prize finalist. The label runs two tracks side by side: hand-cut demi-couture built from vintage garments and deadstock scarves, and repeatable ready-to-wear made from recycled fabrics in London factories, both circling back to his signature patchworked T-shirt dress, pieced together from four or more secondhand tees he sources himself from UK wholesale warehouses.
Marie Adam-Leenaerdt
Marie Adam-Leenaerdt is the Brussels designer who went from La Cambre graduate to Paris Fashion Week fixture in about a year. She trained at Givenchy and Balenciaga under Demna, launched her label in 2023, and was an LVMH Prize and ANDAM finalist by 2024. In July 2026 she won the ANDAM Grand Prize outright.
Ashlyn
Ashlyn is a New York label built by a patternmaker rather than a stylist, and the difference is visible in every seam. Ashlynn Park trained in Seoul and Tokyo, won Japan's SO-EN Award, then cut patterns at Yohji Yamamoto, Alexander Wang and Calvin Klein 205W39NYC before founding her own line in 2020. Five years later the Met owns her work and the CFDA named her American Emerging Designer of the Year.
AMIYA
AMIYA is the luxury knitwear label from Aimee Song, who spent more than fifteen years building Song of Style after starting it in 2008 while studying interior architecture in San Francisco. She co-founded it with her partner Jacopo Moschin, who scouts the Italian factories that make everything.
Andres Otalora
Andrés Otálora runs his house out of Cali, where the clothes are made by hand by an atelier of more than fifty women, each of them the head of a family. He came to design sideways, having trained and worked as a business administrator first.
Wiederhoeft
Wiederhoeft treats a fashion show as a piece of theatre, which is exactly what its founder was trained to do. Jackson Wiederhoeft won Women's Designer of the Year at Parsons in 2016, spent three years on women's runway collections at Thom Browne, and launched the label in October 2019 with a ten-look story ballet called Spooky Couture. The press calls them the high priest of corsets made in New York, and the corsetry is genuinely the reason.
ARMA
Arma is a Dutch leather and shearling house founded in Badhoevedorp in 1985 by Aram Aykaz, whose father had traded leather skins and shearling in Armenia since the early 1950s. Aykaz started as a cleaner at a leather company, learned the trade, and eventually began designing garments from his own fabrics.
Meridian Swimwear
Sisters Jordan LaGuardia and Terese Ostendorf LaGuardia launched Meridian Swimwear out of Brooklyn in 2022, bringing backgrounds in art direction and luxury womenswear design, including Terese's work at the label LESET, to a category they felt was missing their own point of view. The brand describes its look as relaxed minimalism crossed with retro nostalgia, filtered through the New York City sensibility where both sisters started their fashion careers.
Francesca Miranda
Francesca Miranda started her namesake label in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1995, launching with a menswear shirting line after years spent helping run her husband's garment business. The house is known for reviving pata de cabra, a handcrafted Colombian technique that weaves strips of fabric into fringe-like draping, used across her dresses, tops and skirts and made with local artisans.
Merlette
Marina Cortbawi, an Australian who had spent years running international sales for Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera, founded Merlette in New York in 2016 without any formal design training. She built the label around a gap she saw from the inside of those two houses, women who had evening wear covered but wanted seasonless, lightweight everyday clothes that traveled well.
JUILLET SWIMWEAR
Juillet Swimwear was co-founded by Whitney Wilkerson and Lindsay Rae Hofmann in Los Angeles in September 2017, after Hofmann's earlier work in brand consulting and celebrity dressing. The label has stayed narrow on purpose, contemporary swimwear cut with the kind of finishing usually reserved for eveningwear, which is presumably why it turns up on January Jones, Hailey Bieber and Bella Hadid rather than only in beach photos.
Matteau
Sisters Ilona Hamer and Peta Heinsen launched Matteau in Australia in 2015, after Hamer, then a Vogue Australia editor, complained she could not find a simple, unembellished black bikini and realized the gap was the business. The label started with a tightly edited swim range built as mix-and-match separates
ELCE
ELCE traces back to a small swim shop that Laura Sheather opened in Seminyak, Bali, in her twenties, long before she teamed up with Tara Mitchell to relaunch the label from Sydney. The pair kept the label's Bali roots and wanderlust attitude but rebuilt it as an Australian resortwear brand built around fluid, easy-to-wear cuts and a stated commitment to sustainable production.
Matthew Bruch
Matthew Bruch launched his namesake label for spring/summer 2020 after graduating from Pratt Institute's fashion design program and working for several other lifestyle brands. He built the line around a specific gap he saw in resort wear, easy vacation staples and swimwear designed with more restraint than the ruffled, printed norm, produced in New York from Italian and French fabrications.
Sea
Sean Monahan and Monica Paolini, childhood friends from Newburgh, New York, founded Sea in New York City in 2007, running the label out of a converted Canal Street factory that doubled as their apartment before it was ever a real office. Paolini brought design-director experience from Betsey Johnson and Jill Stuart, and that push-pull between her vintage-leaning eye and Monahan's cleaner, more modern instincts is still the label's defining dynamic.
SLVRLAKE
Louise and Gary Edgley, a UK-born husband and wife who had both worked in fashion retail and buying, founded SLVRLAKE in Los Angeles in 2018. They built it around a narrow idea: premium denim, manufactured ethically in Los Angeles, with clean cuts and no distressing or heavy branding, after years of testing before the first collection shipped.
SIR.
Nikki Campbell and Sophie Coote, two 24-year-old housemates in Bondi, started the label in 2014, launching an Instagram-only linen capsule that reportedly sold out within hours. The name is shorthand for separates, intimates and ready-to-wear, and the label has stuck to that trans-seasonal, resort-minded premise while growing from a digital-only project into wholesale stockists like Barneys, Harrods and Matches.
MAJESTIC FILATURES
Roland Chelly, the son of a tailor, launched Majestic Filatures out of Paris in 1989 with a fairly narrow, almost stubborn idea: take the plain T-shirt and give it the attention usually reserved for tailoring. The house built its own yarns rather than buying stock fabric, folding cashmere, silk, linen and wool into what started as a cotton-only proposition, and it still manufactures exclusively in France and Europe outside of Mongolian cashmere.
Moncler Grenoble
Moncler was founded in 1952 in Monestier-de-Clermont, a mountain village near Grenoble, France, by René Ramillon and André Vincent, originally making sleeping bags and tents for high-altitude workers before down jackets followed. The Grenoble name commemorates 1968, when Moncler outfitted the French downhill ski team at the Grenoble Winter Olympics, and the Grenoble line itself later launched as a dedicated technical collection built for the slopes and apres-ski rather than city streets.