You’d think that Sander Lak would be freaking out. But he’s not. Two weeks out from New York Fashion Week, at a time when pretty much every designer is registering red-alert blood pressure levels, Lak is the very picture of Zen, never mind the fact that his brand, Sies Marjan, was last season’s undisputed breakout star, and that expectations for Lak’s second collection are outrageously high. But Lak’s not sweating it. “Everything’s on schedule; we’re where we need to be right now,” Lak says. “I feel good.”
It’s been a while since New York’s fashion scene has witnessed the launch of a luxury label boasting a voice as distinctive as that of Sies Marjan, and execution so sharp. What made the debut collection magical, though, was its elusive quality: Lak had his references, as all designers do, but you’d be hard-pressed to take in the confetti-color Sies Marjan collection as whole and anchor its look to any one particular historical period or any one particular muse. The Sies Marjan aesthetic was recognizable only as itself—a prime number, indivisible.
So what’s a designer to do to follow up such a strong opening bid? More of the same, pretty much. This time, Lak knows he’s being watched by the industry VIPs who astonished him by turning up at his first-ever show, and this time, he’ll have a bunch of blue-chip retailers readying their pens to write orders for more Sies Marjan clothes. So the pressure’s on. But—Lak insists—his blood pressure is low.
This wasn’t the question I was planning to start with, but I’ve got to ask: How are you so calm?
Well, I guess the main thing is that I’m not one of those designers who likes to work right up to the last minute. I need to spend some time with the garments, to see what I like and what I don’t, and so we’ve set up our development process to allow for that. We start with the color card, so we can order the fabrics—that’s the first thing. Then it’s on to knits and shoes. And so on. The different elements of the collection arrive in the studio and we take stock. It’s a very collaborative process, and I’ve made sure I have people around me who I like and trust. So it’s work, but it’s fun. Really, I’m less stressed now than I was a few months ago, when we were trying to figure out how to produce and deliver all of our first-season orders. There were a lot more than we’d anticipated.
Now that the first collection is in stores, what are you seeing that surprises you?
I think the biggest surprise has been, which pieces from the collection are doing especially well. Not everything is a surprise—there are garments we assumed would get a good response on the sales floor, because they’re very accessible. But we’re selling more color than we’re selling navy, and our actual best seller is that ruffled blouse that Beyoncé wore, and that was a garment we’d figured, you know, retailers might order a few of, and put in the shop window as a lure. But it turns out, customers want to own that blouse. And wear it.
Is that the Beyoncé effect?
In part, maybe. But I think it’s also that the blouse is quite well-priced, for something so special. The make is expensive but the material isn’t, so much. I think the lesson there is people want the look they loved on the runway—not some reinterpreted version where it’s a bit of that color, a bit of that fabric. They’ll buy the actual look if you let them.
Speaking of the runway . . . We’re at an interesting point, right now, where a lot of the old rules about how to launch a fashion brand no longer apply, like, you can declare independence from the catwalk and just, say, post your looks on Instagram. But you’ve chosen to do things the traditional way. Why?
That’s what made sense for Sies Marjan. Maybe there will be a season where we decide, no, this collection doesn’t belong on the runway, let’s find another platform. But for now, I mean—we don’t have our own shop, we don’t do campaigns yet, so the runway is the one place we can get the Sies Marjan message out in a strong way.
But I think if you’re going to do runway, you have to do it in a modern way. I love fashion fantasy, of course, but you still have to be able to sell what you show. That’s what’s modern. I think shoppers are really over that whole thing where, there’s a runway collection and it’s barely related to what you can find in stores. I’m a shopper, and I’m over that. I’ll wait to buy the piece I loved in the show, and I’m annoyed if I find out, oh, that wasn’t made for production. But here’s something else kind of like it. No.
Do you design with a particular customer in mind? Is there “a Sies Marjan girl”?
There’s a Sies Marjan person. I don’t want to think in terms of age or geography or gender. For us, it’s about a mentality. We’re still discovering what defines that mentality. I imagine the definition will emerge, over time. What we know so far is the Sies Marjan person loves color, and the Sies Marjan person wants a sense of ease in their clothes.
If you don’t have a particular customer in mind, what are you envisioning when you start to work on a collection?
We start with color. Whatever the references are in the collection, they come from the colors. I like to be very free with my associations—everything from “these colors remind me of the Dunkin’ Donuts logo” to “they make me think of some Fassbinder film.” High, low, whatever. When I hired my team, an openness to that approach was one thing I was looking for. When we put our references together, it’s like an encyclopedia of all the world’s weirdness.
What are some of the entries in that encyclopedia this season?
Oh, well—I don’t like to talk about it too much, before the show. I can say, there’s a certain idea we’ve been playing with, which comes out of liking acid colors. Like, what would happen if you left a vintage Pucci scarf on a roof in Italy for a year and it got bleached by the sun? What would that look like? Those are the kinds of conversations we have in the studio.
I must say, you use the word “we” more than the average designer.
I don’t like a top-down process. I’m not a designer who makes a sketch, tosses it to the team, and says, “make this.” That doesn’t work for me. It’s not fun. I mean—it’s amazing that I get to do, for work, this thing that I love, so shouldn’t the process be joyful? My CEO, Joey Laurenti, we talked a lot about that before launching the brand—what is the internal culture we want to create? What kind of personalities do we want around us in the office? And what we kept coming back to was, lots of collaboration and no drama. Just people enjoying the work and enjoying each other’s company.
One key member of your creative team is Lotta Volkova. It seems significant that she’s the stylist who works with both you and Vetements, two new brands generating excitement right now.
I’ve known Lotta for a long time—we have friends in common in Paris, from when I was there working with Dries [Van Noten]. I knew she worked really brilliantly with color; that was the reason, initially, I wanted to work with her. But once we did start working together, she came in with the same attitude as me. Do the job, get it done, but do it with joy and with passion. There’s a really positive energy there. I mean, we both just love clothes. We try the looks on ourselves. And neither of us are interested in “reinventing fashion.” It’s more about, “what can we play with? This coat—how can we take it apart and put it back together again?”
Do you think you’ll be able to maintain that playful approach as Sies Marjan grows?
I think we have to. I mean—I don’t know the future; I don’t know how we’ll need to adapt if the company gets a lot bigger. But for now, what I do know is this playfulness is working for us. Maybe the main lesson from the first season was, hey, go ahead: Trust your gut. It’s like, if our instincts have made us successful so far, why should we start questioning our instincts? And our instinct is: Have fun.
The post Sies Marjan’s Sander Lak Talks Color, Collaboration, and Why He’s Feeling Good About His Sophomore Collection appeared first on Vogue.
