Quiet Luxury Canon: The Row and Its Peers
The 2020s 'quiet luxury' moment crystallized a vocabulary that had been building since the 1990s — logo-less tailoring, ultra-fine materials, deliberate refusal of trend. These ten houses define the look.
- 01
The Row
United States · 2006Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen launched The Row in 2006 with a single goal: produce a perfect white T-shirt. The label is named after London's Savile Row, signaling bespoke-tailoring rigor; the production base is Italy, the materials are rare cashmeres, calf-skins, sea-island cottons; the design language is the deliberate refusal of logos, of trend, of any flourish that would date the garment.
- 02
Loro Piana
France · 1924Loro Piana was founded in 1924 in Quarona, Italy by Pietro Loro Piana as a high-end wool merchant supplying the Italian tailoring industry. Six generations later the company remains primarily a textile operation — sourcing the world's finest natural fibres (vicuña, cashmere, Andean lotus, baby cashmere, the Tasmanian merino called 'The Gift of Kings', and the rare Tasmanian wool harvested from a single farm in the Cradle Mountain region) and weaving them at the company's mills in Quarona.
- 03
Brunello Cucinelli
France · 1978Brunello Cucinelli was founded in 1978 by Brunello Cucinelli, an Italian entrepreneur who had abandoned engineering studies to start a cashmere knitwear business in Solomeo, a medieval village in Umbria. The thesis was specific: produce coloured cashmere knitwear — at a time when cashmere was almost exclusively beige or natural — for the elevated-leisure market that traditional Italian luxury didn't yet serve.
- 04
Lemaire
United States · 1991Lemaire was founded in 1991 in Paris by Christophe Lemaire as a contemporary luxury menswear-and-womenswear brand. Christophe Lemaire became the creative director of Lacoste from 2000-2010 (he revived the heritage French sportswear brand while running his own label) and then served as creative director of Hermès women's-ready-to-wear from 2010-2014, before returning full-time to his eponymous brand and launching it in partnership with his life-and-design partner Sarah-Linh Tran. The brand has been one of the defining post-2014 Parisian-anchored contemporary-luxury 'quiet-luxury' brands.
- 05
Margaret Howell
United Kingdom · 1972Margaret Howell was founded in 1970 in London by Margaret Howell, an art-school-trained designer who had been producing menswear in small quantities from her flat in Blackheath. The first product was a single style of cotton shirt; her menswear shop opened on London's South Molton Street in 1980, and women's clothing was added shortly after. The thesis from the start was clear: utility-rooted British menswear (the shirt, the corduroy trouser, the duffle coat, the mac) made to the highest specification she could achieve.
- 06
Studio Nicholson
United Kingdom · 2010Studio Nicholson was founded in 2010 in London by Nick Wakeman as a contemporary womenswear-and-menswear brand specifically focused on what Wakeman described as 'a deliberately-architectural unisex tailoring vocabulary anchored to the late-1980s and 1990s Japanese-tailoring tradition.' The brand's foundational thesis was specific: produce contemporary unisex tailored pieces — voluminous trousers, soft-shouldered blazers, oversized coats — at a contemporary luxury price tier (£300-£800) that read as the heir to the Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake architectural-tailoring proposition.
- 07
KHAITE
United States · 2016Catherine Holstein founded KHAITE in New York in 2016 after a decade working under Vera Wang and as a buyer for the New York retail company SVMoscow. The label launched with a thesis that the contemporary American luxury market had abandoned: take the rigorous, mid-century craft language of European tailoring (Hubert de Givenchy, Madame Grès, the early Madeleine Vionnet) and use it to build a wardrobe for women in their thirties and forties whose lives no longer fit either the streetwear-adjacent contemporary brands or the louder logo-luxury houses.
- 08
AURALEE
Japan · 2015AURALEE was founded in 2015 in Tokyo by Ryota Iwai, a textile-driven designer who had spent the previous decade working in Japanese knitwear and fabric development. The brand's thesis from the first collection was specific: design clothes from the textile up rather than the silhouette down — sourcing or commissioning the finest possible cottons, wools, and merinos, and then engineering garments that let the cloth itself become the design statement.
- 09
Fear of God
United States · 2013Fear of God was founded in 2013 in Los Angeles by Jerry Lorenzo, a former music industry events executive who began the line by selling a small run of distressed flannel shirts and elongated hoodies from his garage. The brand's foundational thesis was specific: build an American luxury menswear vocabulary anchored in the proportions and references of 1980s-1990s West Coast youth culture — the elongated tee, the cropped pant, the racing jacket, the basketball short reimagined as tailored Italian wool.