Nili lotan biography

We had her cashmere, leather, shearling 12 months a year and we sold it. Her customer is 65 and her customer is Lotan, 64, who grew up in Israel in an entrepreneurial family her father was a real estate developer , launched her label in after working as head designer for Ralph Lauren and Nautica. She began by offering six elevated-basic pieces — three trousers, a top and two jackets — made with fabric from a single Italian mill.

Nili lotan biography

The items were cut-and-sewn in New York, then garment dyed. That gave her plenty of flexibility with the colours that she worked on, making her designs difficult to copy. Garment dyeing gave her another essential leg up — the agility to respond to customer demands as well as close control of her inventory. She bought her blank fabric in large quantities, shipped by boat, storing it in a New York warehouse until it was needed.

Those decisions would snowball into an entirely different label and roster of clients. Influential West Coast retailer Elyse Walker says the brand is one of only two the other is Mother Denim that she carries routinely in all seven of her California stores, which feature about brands and are located from Newport Beach to St. Helena in the Napa Valley.

One day retail veteran Mickey Drexler, then chief executive of J. Drexler was so impressed that he wanted to show his design team the label, so he convinced Lotan to climb in his car with armfuls of clothes to take them to the J. Crew studio. She recently hired a knitwear designer, but conceives everything else herself. While half her business is wholesale, the 50 per cent that is direct-to-consumer is growing fastest.

E-commerce, she says, makes up two-thirds of sales and has grown by over 50 per cent annually for the past two years. She owns the label. No partnerships. No investors. She drops fresh designs at least every 60 days, sometimes spontaneously but more often planned in advance. Her slouchy sweatpants and edgy sweatshirts, designed with her own custom colour palette, became staples during the Covid pandemic.

Lotan is currently expanding in all directions. In , Nili Lotan opened her first store in Tribeca New York where she combines her design studio with a retail space. In , Lotan received criticism for using the tatreez in her designs, labelled as cultural appropriation by fashion bloggers and Palestinians, and for labelling the garments Palestinian.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. Israeli-American fashion designer. Netanya , Israel. Biography [ edit ]. Fashion career [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. Jerusalem Post. New York Times.