On the Podcast: How La DoubleJ’s JJ Martin Created One of Fashion’s Most Joyful Brands

Reported by Vogue.

JJ Martin has never been interested in fashion the way fashion is usually interested in itself. The founder and creative director of La DoubleJ — the print-saturated, Milan-based brand that turned vintage silk obsession into a full-blown aesthetic universe — just opened The Lighthouse, a five-story Upper East Side flagship that sells clothes and homewares alongside a dedicated "Light Temple" for meditation, sound healing, and community gatherings. The goal, Martin says, is to create "raise-your-vibration stations" where the transaction is beside the point. That's either visionary or completely unhinged. Possibly both.

According to Vogue, Martin's path to building one of fashion's most recognizable brands was anything but strategic. She moved to Milan for love in 2001, spent years reporting on runway shows from what she calls the "55th row standing," eventually earned the attention of Suzy Menkes, and built a legitimate journalism career — before deciding that still wasn't enough. When she finally launched La DoubleJ, she wasn't following a business plan. "I was just kind of following the joy rocket," she says. Her advice to anyone considering a leap: "Follow the joy crumbs. Anything that you would do for free at night and on the weekends has value." It's the kind of line that sounds like a motivational poster until you realize the woman saying it built a brand from a vintage clothing hobby and a single silk swing dress produced with historic Lake Como manufacturer Mantero.

Beauty as a Business Model

What Martin built from that first dress is now shorthand for a particular kind of maximalist joy — bold prints, Italian craftsmanship, the sincere belief that beauty is not frivolous. She's become an unlikely ambassador for the Italian way of life in the process. "The Italians know how to live. They know how to laugh. They know how to eat. They know how to rest," she says, and you get the sense she's not just pitching a brand identity — she actually means it.

The sincerity is harder to dismiss when you factor in what she's been through. Last year's Los Angeles wildfires destroyed not only her plans for a Pacific Palisades store, but also her childhood home and her grandmother's house. Martin kept moving anyway. She's calling for a fashion industry with less greed, deeper respect for craft, and a stronger collective purpose — and framing it not as idealism but as necessity. "Beauty has power," she says, and in her hands, that's not a soft statement.

In an industry that often mistakes cynicism for sophistication, Martin is a useful reminder that conviction — real, uncool, full-volume conviction — is its own kind of edge.

Read the original at Vogue.