La Ligne Celebrates 10 Years With a Very New York Soirée
Hillary Clinton, Olivia Wilde, Emma Stone, and more gathered to toast their success
Reported by Harper's Bazaar.
A decade is a long time in fashion — long enough to watch trends cycle back twice, see entire brands evaporate, and watch the industry reshape itself around algorithms and drops. That La Ligne has not only survived but genuinely thrived says everything about what founders Meredith Melling, Molly Howard, and Valerie Macaulay understood from the start: that women want clothes that actually work, not clothes that require a manifesto to justify wearing them.
The three former magazine editors and fashion executives launched La Ligne ten years ago with a tight edit of shirts and knitwear built around their obsession with stripes. What followed was a slow, deliberate expansion into a full wardrobe proposition — the kind of brand where you buy one piece and return for twelve more. To mark the milestone, they threw the kind of party New York does better than anywhere: effortlessly over the top. According to Harper's Bazaar, the celebration unfolded at The Pool, Major Food Group's Midtown landmark, transformed for the evening by Bronson Van Wyck of Workshop Productions. Hand-drawn illustrations of taxicabs, tulips, and pigeons — New York in miniature, courtesy of artist Arianna Magulis — covered the table settings. A waiter in La Ligne's signature stripes and actual waders served margaritas and martinis via ice luge. It was theatrical without being try-hard, which, frankly, is the brand in a sentence.
The Guest List Was the Point
A three-course dinner, cotton candy for dessert, and a crowd that included Emma Stone, Olivia Wilde, and Hillary and Chelsea Clinton — the room itself was a kind of editorial. After dinner, Leigh Lezark of The Misshapes closed the night with a DJ set. But what mattered more than the celebrity attendance was what everyone wore: La Ligne's own pieces, interpreted through distinctly individual style lenses. Great shirting. Easy silk dresses. Subtle statements in unexpected patterns. Nothing that screamed, everything that landed.
That range — the way different women read the same clothes differently and still look like themselves — is exactly the argument La Ligne has been making for ten years. It's not a brand that tells you who to be. It's one that gives you enough to work with and trusts you to figure out the rest. In a market full of brands performing identity at you, that restraint is increasingly rare, and increasingly valuable.
Ten years in, the stripes haven't gotten old — and neither has the point of view behind them.
Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.
