Lauren Manoogian is known for her knits — for her plush and loamy pull-overs, feather-soft trousers, and blanket skirts. These are oversize, in wool and alpaca that swaddle, and in shapes that skew archetypal and elven. There is a tabard. There is a poncho. There is a bucket hat that plops on the head like a tulip. She designs in colors so pale, and fabrics so hand-wash, that a subway seat looks like a threat. The appeal of Manoogian’s clothes, in taupe and écru and mushroom and bone, is obscure until you’re close enough to stroke the felted alpaca. Sure, you could find a beige cardigan for under $500. But would its weave hit your hand like contact serotonin?
There’s the kind of clothes you want to buy because of how they’ll make you appear to others. Then there’s the kind you want to buy because once you try them on you can’t bear to take them off. Manoogian, 41, insists that the brand which shares her name is strictly type two. “We’re niche,” she says. “I think people are buying things intuitively, without knowing anything.” But that doesn’t track with how conspicuous her inconspicuous clothes have become over the past few years. Last month, the brand, which already sells in 120 stores worldwide and has expanded beyond knits to cotton separates and accessories, opened its first standalone shop in Soho. Dakota Johnson and Katy Perry step out in Manoogian sweaters and Manoogian hats while fashion critics and influencers post odes to their Manoogian skirts and Manoogian coats. Laura Reilly, who writes the fashion newsletter Magasin, sees the brand’s peers as other independent designers working in the slow-clothes movement, such as fellow New York labels Attersee and Maria McManus. Some might call what they do quiet luxury. “Obviously, The Row is the big culprit,” Reilly says. “When people wear these kinds of clothes, there could be a bit of virtue signaling going on: ‘I’m thoughtful and I know what’s good.’” That hasn’t stopped Reilly herself from buying Manoogian’s $700-ish alpaca-wool coat in two different colors.
When I meet Manoogian at her surprisingly huge, unsurprisingly white store on Broome Street, she’s accompanied by her romantic and business partner Chris Fireoved, 38. The couple live together in Bed-Stuy with their two dogs but on this day have just returned from one of many, many planned trips to Lima, where nearly everything they design is manufactured using Peruvian alpaca, wool, and cotton. Although Manoogian (the name is Armenian, pronounced with a hard G) started the brand on her own in 2008, she’s been running it with Fireoved for the past decade, and the business is their life. They style together, design together, and make big decisions together. Fireoved jokes that people call them “the two Laurens.” But the knitwear is all Manoogian. “That’s my baby,” she says. “I’m involved with every detail of that.”
Poised and subdued, with her shiny hair tucked into her turtleneck, Manoogian says she never made clothes when she was growing up in St. Louis. That all started when she attended RISD, an art school which happens to have one of the best-regarded textile programs in the country. “I didn’t know anything about knitting,” she says. “But I realized making textiles was fun and experimental. You could try things, get instant gratification.” After she graduated, she fell into freelance knitwear design for other people’s brands, then started making and selling her own geometric leather cuff bracelets on the side. She’s not really a jewelry person, though — when we meet, she wears only a sculptural silver ring — and knits remained a fixation: She spent hours of her own time in her studio working on the loom, learning how to construct garments, unraveling them and starting again. By the time one of her clients’ factories in Peru offered her the chance to make a couple knit pieces of her own in 2010, she was ready.
The Dune-ish palette came naturally. “I didn’t have the ability to do custom colors because I was literally using old yarn that was left over at the warehouse of the factory,” she says. That wasn’t a problem: She prefers lighter yarns anyway for the way they recall the originating animal and reveal the qualities of the material. “And I mean, you can only do so many things,” she adds. “If you’re super-focused on color and brightness, you can’t have insane texture. To my mind, that’s overwhelming.” She didn’t like to work in black either, feeling it looked too “flat,” although she did make an exception for Fireoved when they started dating in 2014. At the time, he was a skater who was working on a clothing and video-production company with his friends, shooting high-concept skate videos around the world. “I wore ratty, ripped clothes — I don’t think I even owned a sweater. Lauren introduced me to a whole new world of dressing, of color and shape,” he says. He takes off his black alpaca crewneck and shows it to me. “She helped me make this on the loom when we first met.” Almost immediately, he started working on the brand alongside her.
Erin Wylie, the co-founder of the style and culture newsletter Blackbird Spyplane, has been buying pieces from Lauren Manoogian since 2015, when she picked up a crinkly washed-cotton blazer at Bird in Brooklyn, “or one of those other stores that doesn’t exist anymore.” She sees references to Comme des Garçons and Margiela in the leather clogs, the sweaters, the baggy linen pants Wylie’s husband keeps stealing from her. “It treads the line between masculine and feminine. It’s not just cozy, soft, fuzzy,” she says. “The shapes are more like really soft armor.”
If you ask Manoogian why her clothes look the way they do, there’s a feeling of sitting down with an atomic physicist and asking them why big bomb go boom. She speaks in terms of “micro adjustments” and “micro changes,” like how the mill should wash their alpaca to adjust for unusual humidity. Even if she knows other people just see a gray sweater, she wants to “spend time dialing in the colors: ‘This gray is way too blue. It needs to be more brown.’ That’s the behind-the-scenes agony. And the enjoyment of being so specific.” She acknowledges that her clothes resemble, broadly, folk clothing from around the world with their open fronts and roomy proportions. She chalks that up to her lack of formal fashion training. “When figuring out how to make something, especially from simple panels, people just come to the same conclusions,” she says.
The business of Lauren Manoogian is reaching a threshold. Manoogian and Fireoved want to keep trying new things — like the Japanese nylon they’re using for the first time this season, hand-dyed and sewn into big baggy suits in palest blue and bright olive. They’re doing bodycon in open-weave knits that look like mesh. They even started making black clothes. Having their own retail space lets them experiment, turning out tiny runs that make no sense for wholesale and total sense on Broome Street. They’re dreaming of menswear, maybe even in time for the holidays. They’re dreaming of rugs and other home goods. But it’s getting to the point where their process will need to adjust. Even if they have a team of ten working with them in New York and another ten in Peru, the couple still design all the clothes themselves and spend all their time flying back and forth.
“‘Where does it go from here?’ is everyone’s natural question,’” says Fireoved. “At what point do things start to get watered down? How do we really learn to grow our team and work collectively?” They’re not comfortable with delegating, except maybe within their social circle; Manoogian’s friend Luren Jenison did the plaster finish on the walls, while the store’s architect, Rodrigo Santillán Barcellos, is a friend of Fireoved’s whom he met skating in Lima. “Even during the build-out, I just liked being on-site and being involved. I’d rather do that than be marketing something,” says Manoogian. “Probably to the detriment of our business.”
For now, they’re going to keep iterating, even if that means adjusting, and readjusting, their most popular piece. Fireoved walks over to a rack and pulls out the best-selling coat that he refers to as their “dogs’ college fund”: a hooded, shawl-collared rabbinical thing called the Capote. They’ve now been making versions of it for a dozen years. “I think if someone didn’t know anything about the brand, they would maybe recognize that,” says Manoogian. “Also … a lot of people have copied it.” Still, she saw room for improvement. She always does. “There was this part of the hood that always really bothered me; it kind of stuck down. This season, I changed it.” She smiles. “No one noticed.”
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Madeline Leung Coleman , 2024-04-11 14:00:09
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