Chan Luu

Chan Luu

Chan Luu started her namesake line in 1996 out of a Los Angeles garage, after two decades working retail floors and buying desks around the fashion industry. The label built its name on handmade jewelry produced with artisans in Vietnam and India, the kind of wrap bracelets and beaded pieces that made her a fixture on 2000s red carpets long before hers was a household name.

Jewelry

This is the part of the business Chan Luu actually built first, back when the whole operation ran out of her garage. The wrap bracelets and mixed-stone pieces here still trace back to the same small, artisan-run workshop model she set up outside Hanoi decades ago, not a factory chasing volume. It is quieter work than the phrase costume jewelry usually implies.

More Jewelry

A second grid of jewelry says something about how deep this category actually runs for the label, rather than being one hero style repeated in different colors. Chan Luu's niece Tessa Tran, now running the house, still sources from the same Indian ateliers her aunt worked with, so the range keeps expanding sideways instead of just refreshing. It rewards actually scrolling past the first few rows.

Trousers and shorts

Ready-to-wear came later for Chan Luu, added in 2004 once the jewelry business was already established and paying its own way. That order matters here: these are pieces built by a house that thinks in texture and handwork first, tailoring second. Nothing in this grid is trying to be the main event.

Tops and shirting

Tessa Tran's reboot of the label leaned back into ready-to-wear starting with the Spring 2023 collection, and shirting is where that return shows up most plainly. The silhouettes stay loose and California in temperament, which tracks for a brand that has always been more Topanga than Seventh Avenue. It is easy to underrate a shirt until you notice the beading.

Dresses

Dresses are the newest chapter of a brand that spent most of its first fifteen years as a jewelry house, and it shows in how much these pieces still lean on embellishment and print rather than construction tricks. The bohemian instinct Chan Luu built her name on in the early 2000s survives here almost intact. Consider it the label finally dressing the woman who was already wearing its bracelets.

Knitwear

Cashmere entered the Chan Luu offering as the brand widened out from pure jewelry, and it is one of the categories that has aged the best. The pieces here favor soft, wearable shapes over anything fussy, in keeping with a house whose whole ethos was never about flash. It is the least talked-about part of the label and arguably one of the more useful.

More from the collection

Everything left over in this grid is where Chan Luu's range-building habit is most visible, jewelry logic applied to accessories and odds and ends that do not fit neatly elsewhere. The brand has always grown by adding adjacent categories rather than replacing old ones. That accumulation is basically the whole story of this label in miniature.

Our honest take

Chan Luu earned its reputation the slow way, through two decades of actual handmade production rather than a single viral moment, and that history is still legible in the jewelry counters of this edit. Where the read gets more mixed is ready-to-wear, which is newer territory for the house and occasionally feels like it is still finding its footing next to the accessories that made the name. Buy this for the bracelets first.