Lady White Co. Spent a Decade Proving That Less Is More
The average 10th anniversary lookbook is probably set amidst a remote mountain vista or scenic beach. Maybe it's lensed in the brand's hometown, bringing it all back to where it began.
Not Lady White Co. The Californian clothing label surreptitiously shot its celebratory 10-year capsule at a university in Chicago.
This is Lady White, the label that's spent the past decade honing the tropes of American sportswear into menswear so classically fine it's practically futuristic. This is a maker that deals exclusively in uncompromising specifics.
Case in point: Every Lady White product is sourced and finished within a short drive from its Los Angeles headquarters, save for cotton grown in North Carolina and socks made in Japan. And the Lady White flagship less a clothing store than a temple to the architectural codes that shape its streamlined design language.
Those codes, that language: They meet in Lady White's 10th anniversary lookbook, set on the grounds of Illinois Tech's S. R. Crown Hall.
This miracle of minimalist glass and steel was envisioned by renowned architect and perpetual Lady White touchstone Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, commonly referred to as "Mies." For both Mies and Lady White Co., restraint is everything.
"Mies intended the [S.R. Crown Hall's] users to modify it freely to their use; we found a particular resonance with the architectural language of the Hall," the brand tells Highsnobiety. "LW - C's Spring/Summer 2025 collection invites the wearer to find their own settings in the clothing, made from the essential fabric of daily living: Cotton jersey."
Available on Lady White Co.'s website from March 29, the 10th anniversary capsule reflects Lady White's adherence to utilitarian garments of quiet quality and overt stylishness.
Its signature boxy hoodies and gently relaxed T-shirts are elusive reworkings of the clothes that exist in every closet in America. But Lady White's versions are made better, more ethically, with more intent.
They formed the foundation of Lady White when it was founded in 2015, the same year as longtime partner and likeminded thinker Evan Kinori, and they're still key to its contemporary process.
From there, its oeuvre has expanded to crisp windbreakers, fleecy zip-ups, polo-collar shirting, and elasticated-waist trousers.
These are all-day wearables drawn from day-off outfits of the mid-20th century, made modern by the jersey textiles that Lady White has knit to such exacting specifications that it offers no less than a half-dozen different "basic" T-shirts. The color palette, as always, is muted, versatile and knowingly — dare I say — restrained.
Lady White mastered this approach over the past decade by drilling down into the essential forms of these garments, painstakingly shaping the seams and silhouettes.
It was a methodical process, to be sure, one that recalls Mies patiently, purposely arranging glass panels and indelicate frameworks to create abrupt open spaces, erasing the boundary between indoors and out. Sometimes, less really is more.
