December 5, 2022 |
To all the people who wrote off denim during the pandemic: eat your words. The category is roaring back into fashion, with sales soaring and the more exciting the treatments and high-fashion the cuts, the better. Post-Covid, denim has come back differently. Yes, we want a great fitting pair of jeans, but we also want a denim wardrobe, fit for modern life.
Riding high on this new denim wave is Le Jean, an LA brand which marries the approachability and effortlessness of great denim with the excitement of strong fashion point of view. “I believe in fashion. It’s a reason to look at a new brand and fall in love with denim again,” says Charlie Gay, the British-born designer and former Alexander McQueen alumni, who pours her denim and design expertise into every look. There’s a sense of creative freedom in her approach as she takes directional nineties and noughties silhouettes and asks, “How would that work in denim?”
It’s resulted in plenty of Le Jean wardrobe winners including denim pussy bow blouses, quilted denim co-ords, oversized shirts trimmed with pearls or diamanté, a wrap top that was inspired by a favourite nineties-style chiffon dress, cult bias cut denim midi-skirts and jeans that are cut with the slouch of trousers (lower on the hip and looser on the rise).
Her freewheeling high fashion attitude is no doubt informed by the time she spent at Alexander McQueen, where Gay worked on several denim catwalk pieces. “Alexander McQueen gave me a different perspective. It was about pushing the envelope and mixing craft and expertise.” She’s carried on that sense of experimentation at Le Jean.
Charlie Gay has one of the most enviable CV’s in denim. Born in Yorkshire, she started her career crafting catwalk pieces for Alexander McQueen, conquered the British high street at TopShop, then the American mainstream at Abercrombie and Fitch. After that there was only one place she needed to be. In 2008 she moved to LA, the home of premium denim. “It is where every denim designer wants to be,” says Gay. There she steered the look of such era defining brands as Juicy Couture, Hudson and Paige. But in 2019, after having children, she wanted the freedom to work for herself and set up Le Jean with her husband Rudy, who works on the business side of the brand. Proudly based in LA, her design office and the small artisan factories that produce Le Jean are all half an hour from her Manhattan Beach home. The result is the ultimate fusion of Gay’s British design sensibility with LA’s rich denim heritage and laid-back style.
Photography courtesy of Le Jean.
