Lemaire

Lemaire was founded in 1991 in Paris by Christophe Lemaire as a contemporary luxury menswear-and-womenswear brand. Christophe Lemaire became the creative director of Lacoste from 2000-2010 (he revived the heritage French sportswear brand while running his own label) and then served as creative director of Hermès women's-ready-to-wear from 2010-2014, before returning full-time to his eponymous brand and launching it in partnership with his life-and-design partner Sarah-Linh Tran. The brand has been one of the defining post-2014 Parisian-anchored contemporary-luxury 'quiet-luxury' brands. The Lemaire vocabulary settled around several recurring elements: deliberately-architectural soft-shouldered single-breasted blazers and trousers in Italian-and-Japanese-mill wool, the brand's iconic Croissant handbag (a defining 2019-era handbag-category product), deliberately-deconstructed cotton-and-linen oxford shirts with soft-shouldered construction, the brand's recurring use of natural-fibre fabrics (wool, cotton, silk, linen, cashmere — almost no synthetic fibres), and a colour palette anchored to ecru, washed-cream, oxblood, washed-charcoal, washed-navy, soft-pink, plus the brand's recurring use of natural-undyed, deep-navy, and traditional-Japanese-dye colour combinations. The brand has presented at Paris Men's and Women's Fashion Week each season. The brand is independent and held by Lemaire and Tran. Lemaire operates flagship retail in Paris (Rue de Poitou — the brand's home flagship; Rue de la Verrerie), Tokyo (Aoyama, Daikanyama, Ginza), Seoul (Hannam-dong), London (Mayfair), New York (Soho), plus international wholesale through SSENSE, MR PORTER, MATCHES, Mytheresa, Net-a-Porter, Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, Lane Crawford, the Boontheshop network in Seoul, the Beams network in Tokyo, and the broader Japanese-and-American luxury-customer distribution. The brand has been one of the defining post-2014 Parisian-anchored 'quiet-luxury-natural-fibre' brands.