EXCLUSIVE: Derek Lam Is Returning to Fashion
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Derek Lam has joined the Italian brand Câllas Milano as creative director.
Lam will present an initial capsule collection for fall 2024, which will be unveiled the morning of Feb. 10 during New York Fashion Week.
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Câllas Milano was launched in 2020 by business partners Jan-Hendrik Schlottmann (Lam’s husband), and Marco Panzeri, chief executive officer of Italian manufacturer Cieffe. The vertically integrated company offers relatively basic designer women’s ready-to-wear, including blouses, trousers and outerwear, some of it with scarf-y silk details, priced from about $140 to $1,495, and sold at Neiman Marcus, Elyse Walker, Ikram, and The Conservatory.
“Câllas is dedicated to creating responsibly made luxury,” said Schlottmann, who named the brand after the American-born opera singer Maria Callas. “Our products are made with a conscious and ethical approach, utilizing locally sourced materials and crafts. Our focus is on craftsmanship, ensuring high quality and longevity. Our motto is: what is beautiful today, remains beautiful tomorrow.”
Lam’s immediate objective is to establish a more clear and recognizable brand identity, with distinctive silhouettes across all categories, he said. That will include more interesting and provocative outerwear, tailoring and knitwear.
Born in San Francisco, the Chinese-American designer began his career as an assistant to Michael Kors before launching his namesake brand in 2003. Coming up in the early 2000s alongside a generation of New York labels that included Proenza Schouler, Jason Wu, Thakoon and Phillip Lim, Lam built his business on sportswear, tailoring and outerwear with plenty of leather and fur. He was also creative director of Tod’s ready-to-wear from 2005 to 2010.
In 2019, he shuttered his collection business to focus on his contemporary label 10 Crosby, which was acquired by Public Clothing Company in 2020.
“Obviously, there’s always disappointment when there’s such dramatic change and something that we dedicated a lot of time to and ownership of with our partners and with other entities to build,” he said of leaving his luxury brand. “But we were also coming out of a period where it was so challenging to find a good foothold with all that was happening with the economy, with what was happening with retail and just the diversion of interest because of the change of lifestyle.”
After winding down his work at 10 Crosby a year ago, he wasn’t sure he’d return to fashion at all.
Lam had spent his down time learning to cook (beef cumin is a favorite) and teaching himself piano, which kept the creative juices flowing until he was ready to take on a new challenge.
“I saw the development and what they were building at Câllas with responsible practices and it just became more and more intriguing,” he said. “It fits my point of view about being a designer now.”
While Lam was largely known in the 2010s for dressed-up sportswear, outfitting former First Lady Michelle Obama on more than one occasion, and launching a collaboration with Kohl’s, “work now encompasses 24/7 and women’s style has evolved from what’s traditionally expected,” he said. “So there will be tailoring because that’s what’s amazing and beautiful coming from Italy, and Câllas is known for the pants and the shirt as a foundation to build on. But I feel like I should bring something a little bit more directional and emotional so it stays within what people understand but also is, ‘Oh, I really gotta have that.'”
He’s excited about working vertically with the brand’s factory in northern Italy, which is not only a resource for creating quality clothing but considers the environmental and human impact of production. “The mere fact that the factory actually produces its own energy…And most of what’s made there is shipped directly to the client by someone in the facility, so it is very in-house with a combination of incredibly highly skilled artisans and technicians that you expect from an Italian company.”
To be closer to the work, he and Schlottman moved to Paris last year, where they live in the Marais.
But Câllas sees immediate growth potential in the United States “by nature that I am an American designer, and this is a partnership with Jan,” Lam said. “But I’m also really inspired by what I’m seeing in Paris, where women love their coats, so that will help me design with an international point of view.”
To that end, debuting the Câllas fall 2024 capsule in New York made sense. “I’m confident that we can show something that’s interesting, that really will become a blueprint to show how the brand will develop under my work,” he said. “And New York is still home, and I feel like I still have a nice group of supporters.”
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