They’ve Earned Their Stripes! La Ligne Marked 10 Years with an Epic Dinner Party

Reported by Vogue.

Ten years into building one of the most covetable stripe-centric labels in fashion, La Ligne's founders — Molly Howard, Valerie Macaulay, and Meredith Melling — threw the kind of anniversary dinner that makes you wish you'd been on the list. The venue: The Pool + Grill, Midtown's cathedral-ceilinged institution. The dress code: implicitly fabulous. According to Vogue, the guest roster ran from Hillary and Chelsea Clinton to Emma Stone, Olivia Wilde, Nina Dobrev, Seth Meyers, and Noah Kahan — a room that felt less like a brand event and more like a very well-dressed family reunion.

The details did the talking. Paper tablecloths hand-illustrated by artist Arianna Margulis — pigeons, taxis, tulips, skyscrapers — covered long banquet tables set with coupes of crayons. A male model in waders presided over an ice luge stocked with margaritas and martinis. A blue-and-yellow striped step-and-repeat anchored the corner. Spicy tuna toasts and lobster tostadas circulated. Meyers, for his part, summed up the energy succinctly: "It is nice to be here, especially because it wasn't a cash bar."

More Than a Milestone

The evening carried genuine weight beneath the glamour. Macaulay called it "a renewal of vows" — the brand started out of Melling's apartment, scrappy and uncertain, and weathered Covid, tariffs, and years of instability to get to this room. "This is also a thank you to everybody here who helped us along the way," she said. Howard's toast went further: her parents were married at this very venue, their altar positioned above the same pool where guests were now sipping cocktails. Macaulay wore custom white satin pants she and the brand made together for her own wedding in 2016. The sentimentality wasn't performative — it was structural.

The venue itself was a statement of identity. The founders considered Lower East Side spots and uptown alternatives before landing on Mario Carbone's iconic space — a natural choice given La Ligne's existing menswear collaboration with him. "It felt iconically New York, as Francophile as we are," Melling said. Howard was quicker to drop the affectation: "We always try to pretend we are French, but at the end of the day, we are just three American girls." Three American girls who built a brand on instinct, loyalty, and a very good stripe — and after a decade, clearly know how to close out a night on a dance floor.

If a brand's longevity is measured not just in revenue but in the room it can fill, La Ligne just made its strongest case yet.

Read the original at Vogue.